Chiefs at Broncos - Week 7 - Record: 6-1

I don't know about this offense. I do know it was 14 degrees with flurries in Denver -- looked just like the game we played against them here at Arrowhead last year, so there's that. But wow, until the 4th quarter when we had a short field and Tyreek ran in one of those open-space specials in the red zone, we were just sloggin'. The announcer said that we'd been 0-7 on 3rd down in the game. That stinks.

Good thing our pass defense was fine and our run defense fine enough. We also got beaucoup help from our special teams highlighted by a booming punt from Tommy Townsend downed at the one and a super kickoff return for touchdown by Byron Pringle, as well as turnovers galore:

-  Pick-six for Daniel Sorensen,

-  Tershawn Wharton strip and fumble recovery.

-  Messed-up flea flicker scooped up by Frank Clark.

-  Interception by Tyrann Mathieu.

In a sense our own opportunistic defensive play and special teams weirdly kept Mahomes et al off the field. It just seemed like they were rusty every time they got out there. Le'Veon Bell's first run went for 16 which was really nice to see, but he did little the rest of the game. CEH had a few good runs but also dropped a short pass that would've been a touchdown. 

Overall with the elements affecting both teams' play it required those turnovers favoring us, a little bit better quality of football play to win the day, and excellent preparation to take on the high elevation and cold weather. 

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The photograph is from Mike Martin at the official Chiefs site. Thank you.

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Chiefs at Bills - Week 6 - Record: 5-1

Before getting to the game, the Chiefs got even better this week. Yep, it works for us too, how stunningly joyful is that: The rich get richer.

After the Jets released uber-back Le'Veon Bell, Brett Veach did his splendid wining-&-dining thing and got Bell. In my view the best thing about this is how much Bell can teach Clyde Edwards-Helaire -- I've always thought CEH reminded me of Bell. CEH is a phenomenal talent in and of himself (witness tonight's performance), but he is still raw and could benefit from the refinement a Le'Veon Bell can bring to his game.

Anyway, no, Kevin Durant is not joining the Chiefs, but I absolutely loved the posted meme here. As you may know I'm also a big Golden State Warriors fan, so the connection is just delightful. Both of my fave teams dominating their respective leagues right now. (Sure there are qualifications about that with regards to the NBA, but that's another story...)

To this game. I hate to do this or admit I'm doing this, but I'm going to pretty much just post my notes with remarks. Each of these blog posts is some version of that anyway, and really, here tonight you may even get more than I usually post. But I'm afraid these evening games (great that we're on primetime so often!) can be hard when you've got to sleep and get up for very non-Chiefs related work early in the morning.

We came into this one with everyone saying how much Josh Allen should be able to match up with Patrick Mahomes with his strong arm and raw athleticism and all, but really, it wasn't even a contest. With that in mind, into the notes.

Middle of the 1st quarter it looked as though the refs would do us in again as they did last week. On a QB scramble Allen was clearly a yard short of the marker but they gave him the 1st down anyway. A play later their O-lineman was holding Taco Charlton like crazy, but of course, no call. They got the 1st down completion.

Our offense started sluggishly, it seemed like we resumed playing like we did last week, as if the Bills had 14 players on defense. It was raining pretty good throughout the game, so it was good we were eventually able to get our running game going.

The wild thing about this game was our O-line. It was like major reconstructive surgery. We even lost Mitchell Schwartz to a back injury and had to move Mike Remmers from LG over to RT. We slotted Nick Allegretti in there, and I didn't find this out until halfway into the game that we'd replaced Austin Reiter at center with Daniel Kilgore. The only real mainstay through the whole thing, someone with even a few years experience there, was Eric Fisher.

But the interesting thing was they actually played pretty well. Maybe the shakeup, giving some of these kids a chance to shine, made the difference. I believe I'd heard the Bills run defense was not the best, but they were showing more than a few shining moments for our linemen. Hmm, might be nice especially getting ready to see if Bell can still shimmy and slice through defenses with his carries.

The Bills first TD was a terrific throw and catch, Allen to Diggs, at the side of the end zone. Just want to give credit where credit is due.

More rotten officiating. We had penalties up the wazoo tonight, but while late in the 2nd quarter the PI call on Ward was legit, the one against Breeland was not on 3rd-&-11.

Meanwhile Allen was throwing the ball who-knows-where. I'm sure he's a fine quarterback, and it even looked as though when he needed to be a runner he was pretty dangerous. But so often with his passing he was heaving the ball all over the place.

I tracked the possessions of the second in a somewhat sporadic way, but I just wanted to see what we were going to do only up 13-10:

Chiefs: 3rd-&-2 Williams picks up a nice 1st down. 3rd-&-7 Mahomes almost gets picked off, and we have to punt.

Bills: Starting at their own 12 we get a 3-&-out -- our defense does well outta the gate here.

Chiefs: 3rd-&-1 a very nice pitch-sweep left to CEH gets us the 1st down. Using this guy in open space is wonderful to see. Then deep in their territory on a 4th-&-inches Williams blasts past the push and streams into the end zone. 20-10 us.

Bills: Another 3-&-out. Very nice.

Chiefs: In this drive the Bills commit two egregious personal foul penalties, both times violently shoving our guy way out-of-bounds. That helped us a lot, but after again getting deep into Bills territory with CEH running all over these guys, we get to a 2nd-&-1 and can't convert on two straight plays. Ergh. Butker makes it 23-10.

Bills: We start playing soft to keep the big play from happening, and sure enough in a matter of not-too-many plays the Bills score a touchdown. Great, now it's 23-17 with six minutes left. This is not nice.

Chiefs: CEH is now getting stuffed, even fumbling the football away. That was especially scary, except that replays showed his knee was down before they stripped it. Whew. Majorly. Then came what really was the play of the game.

I believe it was 3rd-&14, and Mahomes did his extraordinarily deft scrambling thing to find Byron Pringle breaking open 30 yards downfield. Strike. That really did it for us. With three minutes left Butker came in to bang through the clincher. Final score 26-17.

Of course there's more, but that's kind of the play-by-play. Next week we're at the Broncos place, with Le'Veon Bell joining the squad. I can't wait!

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The offensive line photo is from Steve Sanders at the official Chiefs website. Thank you.

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Raiders at Chiefs - Week 5 - Record: 4-1

It had to happen someday. Our defense's liabilities would be brutally exposed.

Interesting, do you know we'd been 28-2 against the AFC West since that game when Jamaal Charles fumbled it away against the Broncos at the beginning of the 2015 season? Those two games, both Thursday night games: the Raiders in 2017 when we were way ahead but they came back with the help of lots of PI calls on Eric Murray, and 2018 when we were also way ahead but the Chargers came back and beat us with a two-point conversion at the very end of the game. 

The turning point in this one was when we were in total command in the 2nd quarter, and Tyreek Hill was targeted on a deep throw and was totally PI'd by the Raiders defender. No call. There is a ruthless example of where the fourth horseman of the football apocalypse can really destroy us. Right after that obvious non-call we had a chance to keep things going and Mahomes made a great play throwing the ball right into rarely-used Nick Keizer's hands, but he dropped it. A guy like that simply can't afford to drop that ball. 4th down, no points, when we should have had the ball close to the goal line.

It was all downhill from there.

The refs were all over us all day. There were a number of questionable holding calls on our O-linemen that cost us big, a cheap-shot pick call on Kelce that eliminated a TD... I don't know. I could complain about the NFL notifying the officials to start being really picky against us because they had been pretty light on us for the past year and a half. 

As far as our D goes, ouch. We so need better linebackers. This is not news. Ben Niemann is just not getting it done back there. They ran over us all day. Our D-line did okay, but they can only do so much.

The Raiders ran the football against us, which really is the strategy to keep games close against us. Other teams are realizing that because we just don't have that Ray Lewis guy there (oh the years and years I've been shouting for that.) By doing that they are taking possession time away from our offense. That's the secret to beating the Chiefs, and let's face it, if our D cannot stop the run, we won't repeat no matter how great Mahomes is. Our D was not good today. Throughout much of the 2nd half the Raiders played us like we had 8 guys out there on defense.

Their O-line was good. Our O-line, let's face it -- CEH is simply not getting untracked. We lost our fine new LG Osemele early to injury. 

Meanwhile, for much of the 2nd half it looked like the Raiders had 17 guys on defense against us. Mahomes just looked frazzled far too much. We managed to get a late TD score to get us to within one score, but we simply could not stop the run when the Raiders needed to chew clock.

Well, any given Sunday, that's the NFL. We should do fine adjusting our match ups against other teams, and we've been doing a terrific job against our AFC West opponents for a long time. And in a perverse way, we can now really grasp what others know about our team and we should get that worked out.

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Patriots at Chiefs - Week 4 - Record: 4-0

Is it that NE mystique? Is it that this is the NFL? Is it that any big play can hurt you in this game? Is it that with such an overwhelming advantage going in you're bound to have a let-down?

I don't know what it was but it was kind of a surprise to see that we were ahead only 6-3 at the half. This game should've been in the bag from the opening kick. The Pats were without their starting QB, a rejuvenated Cam Newton. They already had a number of players who'd opted out when the season began. They were also without their No. 1 back, Sony Michel.

Thing is, to the Pats' credit that NE mystique is indeed still there. They still have Bill Belichick coaching, and the dude really is a phenomenal coach. With what he's got he's always devised a game plan to mess with us. He was running the ball effectively against our 27th ranked run defense -- yeah, you read that right, 27th is what the graphic said. Abysmal. 

And they did run the ball really well. They chewed up clock and yes, did what they wanted to do -- keep Patrick Mahomes off the field. I am sure moving forward we will play a team that will successfully do this, beating us 18-17 on the strength of the six FGs they'll kick after each time they methodically execute their eight minute drives running the ball ten times in each one. 

So yeah, look out Chiefs Kingdom, I can't see it won't happen. It is pretty obvious that most of us think we're going to wallop everyone 41-2. Well, again, this is the NFL. In fact, we play Buffalo in ten days, in Buffalo, and you can bet they're watching our film. If we can't get more pounding from that front seven watch these teams do exactly that thing.

I knew about midway through the 2nd quarter that this one may just be decided by the big play. In a way, it was, and the two plays that stood out were courtesy of our defensive ends.

At the very end of the 1st half New England was around our ten with seconds to go, and QB Brian Hoyer went back to pass. He waited too long to throw the ball and got sacked by Frank Clark. 0:03, 0:02, 0:01... no time left... NE had already used all its timeouts and Hoyer was supposed to have at least thrown the ball somewhere. Now, not 6-6. Or worse.

After a super-long run-laden drive to start the 2nd half, the Pats again got down to about our ten, and this time it was Taco Charlton with the strip sack to stop that ugliness. That's a potential 14 NE points snuffed out by clutch pass rusher action.

The biggest play on offense was a huge pass completion to Travis Kelce right after that turnover. That got us deep into their territory, and we finished that off with a nifty jet sweep TD to Tyreek Hill. Later we got another one just like it to Mecole Hardman to make the score 19-10 (Butker missed another PAT...) 

We closed it out when Julian Edelman dropped a pass right into the hands of Tyrann Mathieu for a pick-six.

Still, far too close for comfort. This game felt a lot like the Indianapolis game last year, remember that one?  Home game, and were were 4-0. Our offense just couldn't get anything going. We looked like slugs out there with the scant exception of that amazing play when Mahomes hit Byron Pringle in the end zone. Other than that, it was brutal.

Tonight for most of the game, let's face it, it was brutal. The NE defense knew what to do, it played really well -- again give them some cred. We got just enough from Mahomes to put this one away, but our D was facing a 2nd string QB and later a 3rd string QB with whom NE Belichick'd this thing -- you know, like MacGyver'd this thing -- to keep us honest. 

Maybe that's a good thing moving forward, this keeping us honest. We're all reading the Chiefs' press clippings about how dominant we're supposed to be, let's hope the Chiefs aren't.

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The first photo is from Andrew Mather, the second is from Jim Berry, both at the official Chiefs website. Thank you.

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