The conundrum of the Chiefs’ 2025 season is both as old as football and entirely unlike any situation the NFL has seen before. Consider several factors, all true at the same time, each tethered to all the others:
Travis Kelce is one of the best tight ends ever to play professional football.
He is one of Patrick Mahomes’s best friends, one of Andy Reid’s all-time favorites, and beloved across The Kingdom.
He will turn 36 on Oct. 5.
He is no longer the consistent, dominant superstar last seen in full throughout the 2022 season.
And, while his on-field play continues to diminish, his celebrity only continues to amplify.
The Patriots sustained their dynasty by making the most difficult decisions that franchises can confront. Even superstars were cut without fanfare, hand-wringing, or the ability to leave football on their terms. This cold-blooded approach came to define that reign.
In the Chiefs’ dynastic run, they’ve mostly taken a similar route to greatness. But Kelce, his age, his ability and his fame have all combined to present an entirely different calculus this season. Reid maintains his tight end is still a “big part” of the team’s offensive scheme. Mahomes continues to spiral passes toward his favorite target. Kelce, at times but not often through the first quarter of this season, can resemble iterations of his peak self.
Even then, his individual statistics continue to decline. This happens. Last year, Pro Football Focus graded Kelce at 71.7 overall, the lowest mark of his career. His yards-per-reception (8.5) and yards per route run (1.49) also marked career lows. His 823 receiving yards were his lowest total since his second season. His volume of targets remained high, but his efficiency continued to fall. This season marked the first time that PFF ranked a teammate—suspended wide receiver Rashee Rice—ahead of Kelce as Mahomes’s top target. The last time that happened, before 2021, Tyreek Hill was still dashing past defenders in K.C.
After four weeks in 2025, among tight ends, Kelce ranks eighth in receptions (15), fifth in yards (182), eighth in touchdowns (albeit with one score), seventh in targets (22), sixth in yards per reception (12.1), fifth in yards-after-catch-per-reception (7.5) and 30th in drops (0); all per PFF. There’s value there, undoubtedly. Anyone who wants to immerse themselves in 30 minutes of negativity should search “Travis Kelce” on social media. Read that stuff, none of it significant, and you’d think he’d never played football well before. This season is not that.
That said, Kelce ranks third among tight ends in pass snaps, a high total for what those snaps have yielded. His passer rating when targeted is 18th, which signals that perhaps Mahomes has forced—or been forced to force—too many attempts his way. And Kelce’s average depth of target is 24th, only 5.7 yards, which is an expected victory for Father Time.
Add all of this up, and the Chiefs’ conundrum reveals itself more fully. Understand these things up front, each also in relation to the others:
Travis Kelce is a bona fide worldwide celebrity. This means virtually nothing in relation to his on-field decline. (The exception is public comments Kelce made after the 2024 season, in which he admitted to GQ that he wasn’t as prepared at its outset, due to off-field commitments, as he typically had been.)
There’s no reason to place any blame on his relationship with Taylor Swift.
He’s not even the only all-time great Chiefs tight end to end a luminous career this way. Many consider Tony Gonzalez, who played 12 seasons in Kansas City and 17 in the NFL, the best tight end in history. His final year: 121 targets, 83 catches, 859 yards, eight touchdowns. Juxtapose those numbers with Kelce’s from last season: 133, 97, 823, three. Perhaps this conundrum in K.C. owes to nothing more than one year too many. Perhaps.
The conundrum that will define Kansas City’s postseason
This is a column about context, which matters in the NFL, which matters to everyone in the NFL, and yet, hardly seems to register with millions of football addicts. They seem content to live in the extremes that oddly define pro football and hold zero significance in regard to in-game results. Bill Parcells pegged that right a million years ago. It’s disaster or euphoria—nothing in between.
Understand that Travis Kelce is not a geriatric.
His pop star fiancée Taylor Swift is not driving his on-field downfall.
There are, right now, NFL decision-makers who would account for his gaudy résumé, who would play Kelce because he earned it: nine Pro Bowl nods, four AP first-team All-Pro honors, three AP second-team All-Pro selections and, most importantly, three Super Bowl championships.
The Chiefs do not have to be one of those franchises.
Only the most spoiled members of The Kingdom would blame them if they were.
Kelce is, simply, a 36-year-old tight end nearing the end of his career. Who maybe should have ended it already.
Even before the Chiefs’ last Super Bowl triumph, in LVIII two seasons ago, the tight end told Sports Illustrated that he understood he wouldn’t play 15 more years or even five. “I’m going to do this until I can’t anymore,” he said then.
That is not simple. That is the conundrum that will define Kansas City’s postseason ambitions in 2025.
Why Sunday’s victory mattered
Anyone who saw The Kingdom, the excellent docuseries on the Chiefs, their history and last season, could also see that the team itself understands the calculus at play. Like when Mahomes, after a stretch of ugly victories so long he grew exasperated with explaining them, notes during a practice that the “football Gods” seem intent on testing Kansas City.
Mahomes is saying that sustaining winning football in a league designed to limit sustained excellence is, well, nearly impossible. This is supposed to happen. The details are different for each dynasty. In 2024, in Kansas City, general manager Brett Veach bet on Rice, betting that he would become a true No. 1 receiver and flourish with Mahomes. For three games, Veach was right—Rice led the league in receptions, ranked second in receiving yards and caught two touchdowns. “A true No. 1,” Veach told SI in late 2024.
Then Rice got hurt in late September and missed the rest of the season. Then, in March, he was involved in a multi-car, high-speed crash, for which Rice pleaded guilty to two third-degree felony charges, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and five years of probation, and received a six-game suspension from the NFL.
That’s context!
Much consternation roiled after Kelce’s mistakes in the season’s first two weeks. They were not small. In Week 1, a defeat to the Chargers, Kelce collided with the speedy, young wideout Xavier Worthy. Kelce took accountability in the aftermath. The collision gave Worthy a dislocated right shoulder, only three snaps into his season. He didn’t play again until last Sunday, totaling 123 yards.
In Week 2, another defeat—vanquished again by the Eagles—Kelce dropped one late pass attempt near the goal line, which Philly intercepted. The NFL also fined Kelce nearly $15,000 for an obscene gesture he made on the sideline that evening.
In Week 3, Kansas City won for the first time this season, albeit amid one of the ugliest football games this season. There’s no reason to apologize for that. But, on that afternoon against the Giants, TV cameras captured Kelce and Reid arguing on the sideline. Reid even appeared to bump into his tight end. Both men played down the confrontation afterward. They were neither wrong nor lying; this happens all the time. Even then, anyone adding up Kelce’s negative impact on Kansas City’s season had another bullet point to add to their arsenal. In three weeks, Kelce skeptics could argue he cost K.C. two games and nearly screwed up another.
This argument lacked context, too. Kelce graded out among Kansas City’s best performers that day, which said more about how the team performed than how he did (four catches, 26 receiving yards). To pin three games of struggles on Kelce was also unfair. Rice has now served two-thirds of his league suspension. The Chiefs were absent Worthy’s speed. The offensive scheme from Week 1 to Week 4 can best be described as being in triage mode.
Which is why last Sunday mattered—and not just for the beatdown Kansas City handed Baltimore but for the nuance that victory provided. Worthy returned to the lineup. Kelce turned in his most productive game yet (five catches, 48 yards, but in 65.8 percent of the Chiefs’ offense snaps; his lowest percentage played this season). Mahomes found four separate players for touchdowns.
The point: K.C. needed less from Kelce, and he produced more. That’s the way that football works. Imagine what the Chiefs will look like when Rice does return. As Tony Romo noted on Sunday’s broadcast, Kansas City has never had its top three targets going into last season—Rice, Kelce, Marquise “Hollywood” Brown—active for the same game. They’re now 21 games into that experiment, plus last season’s playoffs. That’s not normal. And that’s not Kelce’s fault, either.
None of the relevant context excuses Kelce’s outsized mistakes this season. Nor does any of it mean he won’t contribute to another deep Chiefs playoff run.
The NFL’s most adaptable team
When SI reached out to four Chiefs sources about Kelce last week, none of them seemed panicked. All seemed intent on avoiding the awkwardness inherent in this calculus.
When SI asked four AFC personnel executives to analyze Kelce’s play in relation to Kansas City’s less-than-impressive start, all four described a diminished player. But three of the four said, independently, that public opinion placed far too much blame on the tight end. “It’s not like they are relying on him to win games by himself anymore,” one AFC general manager noted.
When SI asked three Chiefs die-hards—and one bandwagon K.C. fan—what to make of Kelce and this season, the answers presented a wide range of opinions. One attributed the start to an overly complicated scheme lacking sufficient key players to make it work effectively. One noted Kelce as “the least awkward person ever” and his play this season as “kinda expected.” One said he wished K.C. would move on. Another described a “typical aging athlete whose body can no longer do what his mind [tells] him anymore”
“It’s not like they are relying on him to win games by himself anymore.”An AFC GM on Kelce
Notice the range above.
Kelce may continue to start in Kansas City, but his role continues to dwindle. Nonetheless, he still remains critical to another Chiefs’ playoff run. The less Mahomes must rely on him, the better that Kelce will play, and the more central he’ll become.
It’s also quite possible that Kansas City’s offense will continue to endure injury after injury; this pattern began in early 2024 and hasn’t abated since. In that scenario, the executives believe that Kelce’s diminishing impact will be more obvious. Perhaps that would force Reid, Mahomes and Veach to consider alternatives.
Just don’t make two close losses to good teams by a combined nine points and one exceptionally ugly win—all three played with a shorthanded roster—into the date that another football dynasty began to die. Nor should the 37–20 triumph over Baltimore be fashioned into some sure sign that Kansas City will return to its fourth consecutive Super Bowl.
Can’t everyone relax? Of course not! That’s not how pro football and all of its surrounding machinery works. Please, understand this: Since the start of Kansas City’s run under Reid, Mahomes and, yes, Kelce, the Chiefs have proven themselves to be professional football’s most adaptable team. Perhaps this run, with this core, will end in 2025. Maybe it will continue. But anyone betting against that very adaptability might want to let more of the season unfold before making any bold determinations.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Chiefs Found the Formula for Travis Kelce to Excel, And It Will Only Get Stronger.
