We’re calling this the worst playoff win in Chiefs history, an admittedly made up new category but a description that fits the following:
The Chiefs beat the Browns 22-17 in an AFC Division Round playoff game at Arrowhead Stadium, but the image that sticks — the feeling that sticks — is Patrick Mahomes unable to stand up on his own after being tackled on an option run.
He went to the blue injury tent, and then to the locker room, eventually diagnosed with a concussion. What comes next will have an outsized effect on the Chiefs’ immediate future, their hopes for a #RunItBack championship to kickstart a dynasty, and the entirety of the NFL playoffs.
This is something like the first cousin to Chiefs fans’ worst nightmare, and we’re only giving it that much distance because, well, he could play against the Bills in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday.
The Chiefs will have that opportunity because they protected a lead after Mahomes left, in no small part because Chad Henne turned 3rd and 14 into 4th and inches, and the Chiefs turned 4th and inches into a first down conversion that gave them victory formation.
That’s no small thing.
Neither is this: Chad Henne is the Chiefs’ starting quarterback until Mahomes clears the league’s concussion protocol.
For years and decades and years we have gathered in Kansas City to debate the worst playoff loss, and you don’t need to be reminded of all the wonderful, terrible, awful candidates.
This is something else, but with shades of the time Mahomes’ kneecap slid to the side in Denver and — for fans of a certain age — the time Joe Montana left the 1993 AFC Championship Game with a concussion.
Even all these years later, Chiefs coaches and executives from that team are convinced they’d have played in that season’s Super Bowl if Montana could have finished.
That was so long ago that Mahomes was not even born, and we don’t yet have enough information to know how this will go. Mahomes could play. Chad Henne could turn into Nick Foles, a backup quarterback leading a Super Bowl push three seasons after it happened for the Eagles.
Or, even with a win, this could be forever remembered as The Concussion Game, the return of a time-honored and darkly comedic series in which Chiefs fans name their pain. Hello, old friend.
Nobody will feel sorry for the Chiefs. They have too much talent, and too much recent success. The truth is, there are people who work for other franchises who don’t disagree with the dynasty talk.
But this is brutal. This will hang over Kansas City all week, over everything the Chiefs do in preparation and many conversations around town.
Mahomes’ arrival changed everything for the Chiefs. They went from henchmen in other teams’ highlights to the ones turning 3rd and forever into first downs, and 24-point deficits into playoff victories.
If that is all true, then so is this: his absence would change everything for the Chiefs. The margins shrink. The mistakes amplify, and success becomes slippery.
The Chiefs would still be formidable. Thirty-one teams would love to have Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce as their top two pass-catching targets, and quietly, the defense is playing better than any point since Super Bowl LIV.
But the Chiefs did not do all this — they did not talk like this, or believe like this, or work like this — for formidable.
This is supposed to be a dynasty.
A dynasty that now rests on one man’s recovery from a concussion, or his backup’s ability to do something nobody will expect.
