One by one they stepped to the microphone to tell reporters the company line. They talked about working, and about effort, and generally gave the impression of being both frustrated and focused.
Football people are creations of habit, and in these moments of adversity the habit is to talk about having been here before, and having done this before, except this is a remarkable group, in many ways, and especially this one:
The Chiefs have not been here before. Not with this group. They lost 30-24 to the Chargers at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday. The loss can be blamed on a thousand different failures, and we’ll get to as many as we can here, but at least for now the context is more important.
The Chiefs are 1-2 and in last place in the AFC West for the first time since 2015, when a five-game losing streak was low-lighted by an offensive lineman accidentally knocking the ball out of his own running back’s hands on a potential game-winning drive.
This is the first time since then that they have had more losses than wins in a season.
“This is unusual for us,” said special teams coach Dave Toub, who handled the post-game news conference after head coach Andy Reid fell ill. “I’ll be honest. This is a little bit of a crossroads for us.”
Toub has a tendency to speak honestly in front of reporters, especially by the standards of the paranoid NFL. He is putting words to what Chiefs fans were already feeling. The crisis is here, and it’s here earlier than anyone could have anticipated.
The Chiefs have uncompromising standards. They are the rare team that can say their season will either end with a parade or failure, and mean it. Nobody in the organization would look at this long-term pairing of Reid and Mahomes and the star power around them, and see them win just one Super Bowl, and call that a success.
That’s the harsh reality they’ve earned, and here is the harsh reality they’ve created:
They have a porous defense, particularly in the red zone — holy smokes, did you see how open the Chargers were on their first three touchdowns? — and have now developed a habit of self-destruction. A week after literally fumbling away a game-winning drive, the Chiefs’ first three possessions against the Chargers ended with turnovers.
They have played three teams they could conceivably see in the AFC playoffs, and their only win came when the opponent led by two possessions in the fourth quarter and then went away from an effective ground game.
“It’s how you respond,” Mahomes said. “We have a long season ahead of us. It looks real dim right now. But if you can find a way to get better from this, and find a way to win the games within the games, then we’ll be where we want to at the end of the season.”
The Chiefs are no longer who they say they are. They are what their play shows, and so far that’s way too many gaps in fundamentals like tackling and ball security.
They look like a wildly talented group that has come to believe its talent will carry the day without covering for the basics required to be successful at the sport’s highest level.
Let us be clear. The Chiefs are not in a football crisis because of losses to two good teams that came down to the final minute. No, they are in a football crisis because they have a troubling habit now of publicly declaring they would concentrate on and fix specific problems only to watch those problems persist, and in some cases grow.
Let’s point out three, and give each its own paragraph.
A year ago, the Chiefs gave up touchdowns on 76.6% of opponent’s red zone drives, ranking last in the league. They spent a lot of time and words promising to fix that, and have now given up touchdowns on all but one of 13 red zone drives.
A week ago, the Chiefs talked a lot about ball security. They fumbled in the wrong spot and Mahomes threw the worst interception of his career. By the end of the week, they signaled that it was time to stop talking and time to start proving. Then they turned it over four times against the Chargers, who had forced a total of two takeaways in their first two games.
Over the summer, Mahomes turned a news cycle on its head when he said his goal was to go 20-0 this season. The truth is Mahomes did not intend for that to be taken literally, but rather as a public demand for more consistent production and focus throughout the week.
We see how that’s going.
“We’ll find ourselves,” Mahomes said. “We’ll find ourselves over time. And with the guys we have in this locker room, I’m sure we’ll find ways to win.”
That’s the hope, anyway. But Toub is right. This is a crossroads. The Chiefs can fix this. The talent is in the room. But the burden of proof is now theirs, because at the moment they look like a team that is feeling the walls closing in a bit. One mistake is turning to two, two to more, and the losses are coming.
Again: It’s all here. The answers are in the room.
But it’s time for the Chiefs to be what they say they are.
