Texans at Chiefs - Week 6 - Record: 4-2

This is definitely not a Super Bowl team. Sorry but just having Patrick Mahomes and a planetload of receivers will not get it done.

I actually thought our defense would be better than they've played. Know what? This really feels like 2003, you know, awesome offense and not-great defense -- but ya know? It's worse this year. We started out 9-0 that year and I hate to say it, in 2003 our offense was just much more proficient. This year's Chiefs offense is really just Mahomes being ungodly on the football field.

But the key is that Mahomes simply cannot get anything going with an offensive line that is as miserable as this one. At least in 2003 we had a beast offensive line. This one is is garbage. Eric Fisher and Andrew Wylie are injured and their replacements are balsa wood. Our center is not able to do what Mitch Morse did last year, but then Morse was injured all the time so it didn't matter.

This game was a loss from the beginning. Here's what we all witnessed before Tyreek Hill's fantabulous touchdown grab:

1. Personal foul on Anthony Sherman on the kickoff.
2. Mahomes has to scurry around right after the snap, and tries to heave the ball with a defender all over him, smashing into his arm.
3. Swing pass to LeSean McCoy who stumbles down after catching it, little gain.
4. Big play to Darrel Williams who was freed on a pick play that Kelce may have made, at least the announcer insisted he did.
5. Swing pass for no gain, but now they call Kelce for an illegal pick.
6. Motion penalty, five yards back on us.
7. Misdirection pass to Hardman which was the first decent thing, 14 yard gain.
8. Holding call against an O-lineman. (In case you've missed count, that's four penalties against the Chiefs on eight plays of the game so far.)

This game was brutally ugly. Besides the fact that Mahomes doesn't have a good offensive line, his ankle has to be bothering him because his throws were awful. At least four or five times he threw the ball right at a defender -- most times they just dropped the INT.

I also have to add that the officiating had it in for us today. We got tons of defensive holding calls against us, and I'm sorry but I don't believe we were fairly treated. At one point Kelce was mugged at the line and the Texans intercepted Mahomes pass, but they made some ding-dong interpretation of pass interference not-counting for some reason. Interception stays. A couple plays later Bashaud Breeland was called for defensive holding yet he barely touched the guy.

Guh?

This is what happens when you form a super team. They've got to reel you back in. That's what everyone thought about this team, it's a super team! -- and for pretty good reason what with Mahomes et al.

Yeah, sorry, I know I get really melodramatic about these down times, but we just lost two home games in a row for the first time since 2013, and in both games it just looked like everything was against us. Not only the over-officiating, but our woeful line play on both sides of the ball is just killing us.

It is simple. We can stay in games from our exceptional skill-player game -- that's why both these past two games were reasonably close. But today the Texans took a page from the Colts playbook: Just run the ball against the Chiefs because they have no linebackers. Yes Anthony Hitchens is injured, but we were like melted butter out there. We are not pursuing with speed, we are not looking sharp at the point of attack -- and every team knows it. Just run the ball against the Chiefs. What makes this worse is that an opponent's steady running game burns clock and keeps Mahomes off the field.

I've thought a bendy defense may be just okay, but after looking at it the way the Colts and Texans have successfully seen it, I've realized that this defense is a crushingly real liability.

Yep, I've called for this for eons, no reason to stop now: we absolutely need a Ray Lewis guy in the middle of our defense, we really do. Unless Brett Veach can do something incredibly magical for this year, so we can have some confidence that we'll actually be competitive in the playoffs, I'm kind of hoping that notwithstanding that terrific stretch when we actually win games convincingly, we can finish with a record poor enough to get high enough in the draft to pick up that guy, and when he matures in a couple years hope we get a stronger assurance of Super Bowl potential when Mahomes is in his prime.

Next we've got a Thursday night game. At Denver, who over the past few years has lost the last several home games to the Chiefs in horrible ways. They will not be kind to us at all.
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