Chiefs at Steelers - Week 17 - Record: 15-1

Quick take, it's Christmas, family in, you know. I have a brief moment for this one.

First of all, the broken record to counter the blithering other broken record: Stop with the The refs are favoring the Chiefs! BS. They don't, by miles. Do they get some calls? Like the catch that wasn't actually a catch made by Hollywood Brown in the middle of the 2nd half? The Chiefs were just being smart and getting a play off quick so there could be no challenge.

Now of course I do think ref calls should be made from the booth, and those officials should have indeed waved it off. The NFL should be doing that, certainly. But then, a team (the Chiefs themselves?) should have some signal players can make to the sideline any time they saw it and are sure the officials got it wrong on a catch-not-really-a-catch, so our head coach can throw the challenge flag without having to wait around for the replay to try to be sure to do so -- again before the other team runs a quick play to prevent that from happening.

As far as the penalties go, the refs were all over the Chiefs in this one, and from the looks of our receivers they again neglected to call defensive holds against their guys. Today Jawaan Taylor's number was called, what, how many times? Too many, that's for sure. For the most part he was committing the cited infractions, but then again he was facing off against one of the best pass rushers in the league, T.J. Watt. Most of the time he actually did well enough to give Mahomes time, in this one time enough to toss three TD passes against no interceptions. 

Our defense was solid, our special teams did well, we won by a good 19 points against a somewhat bumbling Steelers team. The dagger play was McDuffie's ball punchout on their tight end -- I mean, that guy, Trent McDuffie, what an extraordinary defensive player all around. 

We ourselves could be a bit more composed, we got three unsportsmanlikes, the first two for just doing butthead taunting kind of things -- neither of which hurt us, but still. It is nice the country hates us 'cuz they ain't us, but please. Let's make it about our dominant play, man. That third one? Travis Kelce slam-dunking the goal-post Tony Gonzalez-style to honor the guy after he broke his Chiefs touchdown record. I think that one gets a pass, for sure.

Otherwise, we got to 15-1 and snatched the No. 1 seed. Dang is that great. There's talk of this being one of the best NFL teams ever -- fun to hear, but we still have a whole postseason to navigate. We'll likely play one of these really good teams we're playing right now again 24 days from now, Texans, Steelers, Broncos. The latter one we play to close it all out two Sundays from now, and we'll be resting everybody there a mile high in Denver so it is a real possibility we'll finish at 15-2. But should we get through all that unscathed there is very likely a Baltimore or Buffalo waiting.

For now, the "Three-Peat" train just keeps on barreling.

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The photo is from Tyler McFarland at the official Chiefs website. Thank you.

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