Could the Chiefs … miss the playoffs? Barnwell sizes up the panic level in Kansas City

When Broncos kicker Wil Lutz lined up for a 35-yard field goal to win the game against the Chiefs on Sunday, it must have felt like déjà vu in Denver. Almost exactly one year ago, Lutz was lining up for a 35-yard field goal to beat these same Chiefs at Empower Field at Mile High. Like this one, that kick came after an impressive drive by young quarterback Bo Nix, who had run a mistake-free offense and gotten his team in position for a signature win. Broncos fans were desperate to get one over on their rivals, wanting the sort of victory that propels a franchise forward. It’s hard to believe you’ll beat the Chiefs until you actually beat the Chiefs.

What happened next is most, if not all, of the difference between the 2024 Chiefs and the 2025 Chiefs. Last season’s team managed to save itself a 19-17 victory when Leo Chenal blocked Lutz’s kick. Kansas City went an NFL-record 10-0 in games decided by seven points or less. This year’s team … has not done well in one-score games. After Lutz put his kick through the uprights for a 22-19 Denver win, the Chiefs fell to 0-5 in one-score matchups in 2025.

This was supposed to be the moment when the Chiefs righted the ship. Losing to the Bills in Week 9 was one thing, but Kansas City was now fresh off a bye, which famously affords coach Andy Reid time to build unstoppable game plans. The Broncos were without their best player in star cornerback Pat Surtain II, and Nix was coming off a narrow victory over the Raiders in which he was booed by his own fans. Denver had beaten the Chiefs’ backups in Week 18 last season, but this was different; sitting in eighth place in the AFC, the Chiefs were set to work their way back up to the top of the title picture.

And then they weren’t. The Chiefs’ streak of nine straight AFC West titles is now in serious jeopardy, as they’re 5-5 overall, 3½ games behind Denver and losing the head-to-head tiebreakers with both the Broncos and Chargers. It’s perhaps going to be a very quiet January in the hotels and restaurants of Kansas City for the first time in nearly a decade, and the Chiefs might not be intimidating anybody with the threat of playing in front of their raucous fans in frigid conditions.

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Could it be even worse? Sunday’s loss dropped the Chiefs to the ninth seed in the AFC. The three teams currently in wild-card spots are the Bills, Chargers and Jaguars, who all have one thing in common: beating the Chiefs this season, giving them all the head-to-head tiebreaker advantage. Kansas City is 2-4 in the AFC this season, and it is about to go play the Colts, who are sitting pretty atop the AFC South at 8-2.

It seems wild to suggest that the Chiefs are in serious danger of missing the postseason, and I’ll lay out why I don’t think there’s as much of a difference between this year’s Chiefs and last year’s team by play-by-play standards as it might seem. But ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) gives the Chiefs a 44.6% chance of missing the playoffs after Sunday’s loss. And while it’s easy to dismiss an algorithm and say that it doesn’t understand that these are the Chiefs, well, it was easy to say that about Kansas City’s record in one-score games before the season, too. And now, as Patrick Mahomes & Co. try to recover after another frustrating loss, it feels like this version of the Chiefs is susceptible to a lot of things, math included.

I have all kinds of questions about them right now, and I imagine you do as well. Can the Chiefs pull themselves out of this rut? Or are we looking at a fatally flawed version of a perennial Super Bowl contender? Imagining a playoff picture that doesn’t go through Kansas City is one thing. Imagining a playoff picture without the Chiefs at all? That’s something entirely different.

Jump to:
Are the Chiefs broken?
Why isn’t Mahomes bailing them out?
What’s actually different in 2025?
Does this ever happen to elite QBs?
Could they miss the playoffs?
Could they still win it all?

Are the Chiefs broken?

Deep breath … no. In fact, I don’t think there’s a huge difference on a play-by-play basis between this season’s Chiefs at 5-5 and last season’s team, which went 15-1 before sitting starters against the Broncos after clinching the top seed in the AFC. The measures we use to project underlying performance don’t see a dramatic gap between the two teams.

Lions and Ravens.

The Pythagorean expectation formula would project the 2024 Chiefs to win 10.2 games over a full season and the 2025 Chiefs to win 11.7 games. How and when those points arrive matter, of course, but we know point differential is a better predictor of future win-loss record than the actual win-loss record.

DVOA — which adjusts for down, distance, opponent and game situation — does an even better job of contextualizing team performance than point differential. Before the Week 18 Broncos game last season, the Chiefs were sitting sixth in the league in DVOA at a 21.4% mark. While their 2025 mark doesn’t yet include Sunday’s loss, the Chiefs went into the Broncos game fifth in the league in 2025 DVOA at 25.1%.

ESPN’s FPI also endeavors to measure team strength by adjusting for what does and does not matter. Last season’s Chiefs finished the regular season sixth in FPI. Even with a 5-4 record, the Chiefs entered Sunday leading the league in FPI … and they are still No. 1 after Sunday’s loss.

EPA agrees with the theme here, too. The Chiefs were 11th in EPA per play on offense a year ago and are all the way up to third this season. The defense has improved from 15th in EPA per play to 10th. The schedule has been tougher — the Chiefs faced the league’s 18th-toughest slate in 2024 and have been up against the fifth-toughest set of opponents so far this season — but that’s not enough to account for them going from 15-2 to a 5-5 mark at the midway point of the season.

The difference, of course, is that the Chiefs always managed to find ways to win those close games in 2024. In August, I had the Chiefs on my annual list of teams likely to decline, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone; it’s almost impossible to win 15 or more games in back-to-back seasons, and I’ve been pegging teams with unsustainable records in one-score games as likely decline candidates for quite a long time now. (I still thought the Chiefs were going to win 12 games, which would now require them winning out.)

When writing that piece, it was clear just how flimsy the Chiefs’ 15-win record was, in part because there wasn’t a formula. It would have been one thing if the Chiefs had won shootouts every week, or they had just fielded a truly dominant defense that kept every game a low-scoring affair, or even if their legendary quarterback had routinely made game-winning plays. But none of those things were true. It was something different and often unsustainable every week.

And when we take a closer look at what happened last season, there are more similarities than we might expect to what we’ve seen from the Chiefs this season — just with significantly less impressive results.

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Why aren’t Mahomes and the defense bailing them out?

The Chiefs were demolished by the Eagles in the Super Bowl, but if the games were close in 2024, it felt like Kansas City had some sort of intangible ability to come up with big plays when it absolutely, positively needed them. That’s a characteristic we typically associate with the best quarterbacks, and Mahomes obviously has those sort of game-winning drives on his résumé. The 13-second score against the Bills in the AFC Championship Game and the scramble to help set up the game-winning field goal against the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII are notable examples.

Mahomes has scored late in several of the Chiefs’ losses this season, but the Broncos game was probably the most significant example of Mahomes having a chance to take over the game and win with one big drive and failing to do so. The Chiefs got the ball in a tie game after a Broncos field goal with 4:05 to go, the sort of situation where it would be reasonable to expect Mahomes to make a series of big plays, squeeze out the clock and set up the game-winning score. Instead, the Chiefs went three-and-out, with Mahomes taking a sack on a slot blitz on third down by Ja’Quan McMillian. They never touched the ball again.

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The idea that Mahomes always bailed them out in these situations last season, though, is misplaced. There were plenty of times that he had a chance to either take the lead or seal a game with a drive late in the fourth quarter, only for the offense to flail or disappoint. In their wins over the Ravens, Falcons, Buccaneers, Panthers and Raiders, the Chiefs failed to put away the game or eat up any sort of significant time or yardage with their drives late in the fourth quarter.

It’s a little different in a tie game like Sunday’s Broncos matchup than it would be running a four-minute drill with a lead in those other contests, but the Chiefs have never been completely reliant on their run game to seal up wins. They struggled in situations where a touchdown would have been essential, too. Take last year against the Broncos, when the Chiefs failed on third-and-goal from the 2-yard line with 5:59 to go and settled for a 20-yard field goal to take a two-point lead. The Broncos held the ball the rest of the way and didn’t need to march the length of the field for a touchdown, instead getting into field goal range before Chenal dashed their hopes.

You would have to be very generous to suggest that the defense came up with a stop on that blocked kick in that game, given that it allowed the Broncos to get into field goal range to begin with. And while the Chiefs defense held the Broncos to a field goal on the second-to-last drive Sunday, the Chiefs also allowed a third-and-15 conversion by Nix to Courtland Sutton on a surprisingly passive defensive look. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo showed a five-man rush and then sent three and played Cover 2 man with seven defenders in coverage and a spy — a look that defensive tackle Chris Jones suggested the Broncos called out before the snap. Nix had all day to throw, and Sutton eventually separated from cornerback Jaylen Watson.

Again, though, memories of the defense shutting the door with the game on the line over and over again a year ago are a little misguided. The Ravens marched downfield and came within an Isaiah Likely toenail of scoring a touchdown on the final snap. The Falcons went down the field twice to potentially score a game-winning touchdown in the fourth quarter, only for the Chiefs to get away with an egregious pass interference penalty. Raiders quarterback Aidan O’Connell dropped a snap in field goal range down two points. And of course, Chenal blocked the field goal against the Broncos.

Even if we count those as spectacularly timed stops, this defense still actually blew leads in 2024. The Bucs scored a touchdown with 36 seconds left and kicked an extra point to tie the game, but the Chiefs won the coin toss in overtime and never gave the ball back. The Panthers scored a touchdown and 2-pointer to tie the game with 1:49 to go, only for Mahomes to lead a game-winning drive. The Chargers held the ball for eight minutes and kicked a field goal to take a lead, only for a 31-yard attempt by Matthew Wright to bounce off the uprights and in to give the Chiefs a last-second victory.

Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars to go 60 yards in 75 seconds while protecting a four-point lead, finishing with Lawrence tripping and still having enough time to get up and scramble in for a game-winning touchdown. The Chiefs scored a touchdown to take the lead with 1:48 to go in that game, but Harrison Butker helped fired his kickoff out of bounds, handing the Jags the ball at the 40-yard line.

If we start looking for actual things that have been problems for the Chiefs versus what was going on in 2024, special teams might be a good place to start …

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What’s actually different (and worrying)?

The Chiefs were generally solid on special teams last season and had a few key moments go their way. Chenal won a game with that block. Daniel Carlson missed a 58-yard field goal that would have given the Raiders a fourth-quarter lead. Wright’s field goal bounced off the uprights and in to decide a game. Kickers hit a league-low 81.8% of their field goal and extra point attempts in any situation against the Chiefs last season. They’re 33-of-35 (94.3%) this season.

Between their various kickers last year, the Chiefs were 6-for-6 on field goal attempts to take the lead in the fourth quarter, which was three more successful conversions than any other team in the NFL. They have had a much sloppier operation this season, although it has been mostly in other, more subtle ways. Butker missed an extra point in the loss to the Chargers and a 58-yard field goal attempt in the three-point defeat to the Eagles. On Sunday, he had a kickoff land short of the landing zone, though it didn’t yield any points on the ensuing Broncos drive.

Butker also crucially had an extra point blocked after the touchdown to go up 19-16 in the fourth quarter. Offensive tackle Wanya Morris lined up next to the center on the try, and while teams can overload offensive linemen on these block attempts, the Broncos actually twisted one of the linemen over Morris to the other side of the line, leaving him to help on just one defender. He didn’t get enough on that defender, Frank Crum, who ended up making a critical block. The entire endgame scenario might play out differently if the Broncos needed a touchdown as opposed to settling for a field goal.

Spagnuolo’s conservative playcalling was fascinating to me, too. This is a coach who has made himself a legend by dialing up the right blitz at the right time, most recently to seal up the AFC Championship Game victory against the Bills in January. I can understand dropping into coverage and trying to get Nix to scramble his way into a mistake (and the second-year quarterback nearly did), but it seems out of character for what the Chiefs generally want to do in key spots on the defensive side of the ball.

The decision might have been informed by the reality that the Chiefs just haven’t been a reliable or effective blitzing team this season. After Sunday’s loss, the Chiefs are last in the NFL in pressure rate (32.4%) when they send extra rushers to the quarterback. In 2024, they were ninth (44.0%). And unsurprisingly, if you’re not getting home with your blitzes, you’re not going to be a very good defense behind those calls. The Chiefs dropped from 10th last season in QBR when they blitz to 23rd this season. Nix was 6-of-8 for 113 yards against the blitz Sunday.

It certainly feels like the Chiefs miss safety Justin Reid, who was such a physical presence and reliable tackler for them in the secondary last season before he left for the Saints in free agency. It feels like Spagnuolo is still sorting through who he wants to have on the field in key spots in the secondary, even though it’s mid-November. Trent McDuffie’s playing at a Pro Bowl level and can line up anywhere, while Watsonis locked in as an outside cornerback, but the Chiefs rotate just about everybody else and haven’t seemingly settled on every-down players.

Third-round pick Nohl Williams, who has looked promising in limited duty, didn’t play a defensive snap Sunday. Bryan Cook, who had been coming off the field more often this season, was back to an every-down role for the first time since Week 2. Chris Roland-Wallace, who played some free safety earlier this season, spent all game around the line of scrimmage. Kristian Fulton, who signed a two-year, $20 million deal with the Chiefs this offseason, returned to the lineup for the first time since Week 2 but allowed 21- and 35-yard completions across nine snaps.

Sunday was very nearly the third time this season that Mahomes did something else that has become a major problem for the Chiefs — throwing interceptions in the red zone. He had two interceptions on 105 pass attempts inside the 20-yard line in 2024. Mahomes already has two on 63 attempts this season, and the only reason he doesn’t have a third is because Sunday’s interception by McMillan came on a play that started at the Denver 21-yard line.

Kelce was responsible for one of those picks when he dropped a pass at the goal line against the Eagles, but Mahomes threw a brutal pick-six to Devin Lloyd against the Jaguars and then didn’t get enough on a throw while scrambling to the sideline on Sunday. The Broncos took the ensuing drive downfield for a touchdown. If we count the play from the 21-yard line as a honorary red zone pick, Mahomes has now thrown red zone interceptions in three of their five losses. Even if we just imagine the Chiefs settling for field goals in those spots, the picks have taken nine points off the field for Kansas City. The Eagles, Broncos and Jaguars turned those picks into TDs. That’s a collective 30-point swing in games that were all decided by three points or less.

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The Chiefs are better in some ways, of course, especially on the offensive side of the ball. Josh Simmons has been an upgrade at left tackle, and while he missed time while addressing a situation away from the game, the first-round rookie returned to the lineup on Sunday and delivered a credible job against a fierce set of Broncos edge rushers. Simmons allowed one quick pressure on 48 Mahomes dropbacks. A year ago, in this same game, Kingsley Suamataia filled in for an injured Morris and allowed three quick pressures and a sack at left tackle.

Mahomes has also delivered on his offseason pledge to take more shots downfield. While he was only 1-of-6 on deep passes against the Broncos, the one he hit was a 61-yard completion to Tyquan Thornton, who ran past McMillan for the longest completion of the day. Mahomes also picked up 40- and 47-yard pass interference penalties on throws downfield against Riley Moss. The three Kansas City scoring drives all featured at least one downfield completion or PI penalty, as the Chiefs weren’t otherwise able to string together lengthy drives of shorter conversions.

Mahomes has 17 completions on throws of 20 air yards or more this season, and his QBR on those throws is good for third best in the league. A year ago, he aired it out for only 12 of those completions all season, and his QBR was all the way back in 28th. He was 27th the prior season, too. But at the same time, Mahomes did miss Xavier Worthy and Thornton for what could have been long completions on the opening drive, which might have changed the complexion of the matchup.

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Do quarterbacks like Mahomes ever come up short?

It depends on how many quarterbacks you’re willing to put in his company. FPI gave the Chiefs a 23.9% chance of missing the playoffs before the season, but that’s also allowing for some possibility of Mahomes getting injured. If you polled fans in August and asked them whether a Chiefs team with a healthy Mahomes was going to miss the postseason, I suspect you would have had to work for a few hours before you found someone who actually believed that was a possibility.

Mahomes felt like a preseason lock to make the playoffs because he has never really come close to missing them. The Chiefs were a top-three seed at this point of the season in six of his first seven years as the starting quarterback in Kansas City. The Broncos or Chargers winning the division might have been plausible enough, but leaving spite or schadenfreude aside, nobody was projecting the Chiefs to miss out on the playoffs this summer — and with good reason.

The 30-year-old quarterback also feels like a lock because the guy he’s constantly compared to seemingly never missed the postseason, either. The start of Mahomes’ career overlapped with the final few years of Tom Brady’s legendary run, and the seven-time Super Bowl champion was also booked up in January every year. The Patriots missed the playoffs in 2002 (Brady’s second year as a starter) and 2008 (when Brady tore his ACL in the opener and missed the entire season), and the Buccaneers limped to the playoffs at 8-9 in Brady’s final year as a pro, but those are drastically different situations to the one Mahomes finds himself in at the moment.

Is it fair to hold Mahomes to the standard set by Brady? Sure. If you’re willing to consider other Hall of Famers who won MVP awards, though, you’re going to find that the idea of a legendary quarterback missing the playoffs or lurking at or below .500 through 10 games isn’t exactly unprecedented, even during healthy seasons in the relative prime of their careers:

• Peyton Manning went 6-10 as a 25-year-old with the Colts in 2001, even after earning MVP votes in 1999 and 2000.

• Brett Favre was 5-4 in the middle of his first MVP season in 1995 before turning on the jets. He was 5-5 at this point of the year in 1999 as a 30-year-old for a Packers team that missed the playoffs and was .500 or worse after 10 games in 2003, 2004 and 2005 (although he was closer to the tail end of his career at that point).

• Aaron Rodgers was 4-6 at this point in 2016, which was his age-33 season with the Packers. Green Bay ran the table and won the division before making it to the NFC Championship Game.

• Joe Montana had seasons impacted by a strike and injuries, but he was healthy in 1985, and his 49ers were still only 5-5 through 10 games. Fresh off a Super Bowl win in 1984, the 49ers sneaked into the playoffs as a 10-6 wild card, where they were quickly dispatched by the Giants.

• John Elway won the MVP award in 1987 and took the Broncos to the Super Bowl, but the following season saw him get out to a 5-5 start and miss the playoffs altogether. He was 28 at the time. The Broncos started off 3-7 in 1990 and missed the playoffs again in Elway’s age-30 campaign.

• Dan Marino was the first-team All-Pro quarterback for the third consecutive year in 1986, but after back-to-back postseason runs, a dismal defense led the Dolphins to start 4-6 and miss the playoffs in Marino’s age-25 campaign.

• Kurt Warner wasn’t often healthy enough to complete full seasons, but he did go 0-6 as a starter in 2002, one year removed from winning his second MVP award and playing Brady in the Super Bowl.

Mahomes’ contemporaries have also had their hiccups. Remember that the Bills and Josh Allen were 5-5 at this point two years ago, with Sean McDermott choosing to fire offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey. The Bills actually hit their bye at 6-6, but they won their final five games and combined that with a Dolphins collapse to take the AFC East, only to then lose to the Chiefs at home in the divisional round.

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Lamar Jackson and the Ravens have been too good in the regular season to string together many losses, but they were 6-5 in 2020 after a frustrating loss to the Steelers. Like Allen in Buffalo, Jackson and the Ravens got to work and won their final five games of the season, finishing 11-5. They then beat an 11-5 Titans team on the road for Jackson’s first playoff win before losing to the Bills in the divisional round.

Obviously, other legendary quarterbacks missing the playoffs wouldn’t make doing so any more damaging or disastrous for the Chiefs and Mahomes right now. It would be truly stunning, in part because the guy we’ve designated as the best quarterback in football at any given moment probably hasn’t missed the playoffs in a healthy season since Elway or Montana. This is all eye-of-the-beholder stuff in terms of who’s the best, but we’ve probably been a little spoiled by how consistently great Brady and Mahomes were at winning their respective divisions and making it to the playoffs on an annual basis.

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Are the Chiefs going to miss the playoffs?

I don’t think so. FPI gives them a 55.4% chance of making the postseason. Obviously, there’s always the potential of Mahomes going down injured, which would tank Kansas City’s chances altogether. There’s a chance that we end up in some super tiebreaker that algorithms won’t encounter very often, which probably wouldn’t favor the Chiefs given their record against so many of the other teams in the wild-card hunt. And with their divisional odds down to 9.1%, the Chargers-Broncos rematch in Week 18 could be with the AFC West title on the line. It would take something truly drastic for the Chiefs to get back in that race, though we could have said the same thing about the Bills in 2023, and they managed to sneak ahead of the Dolphins in Week 18 for the AFC East title.

With seven games to go, though, the schedule does get a little bit easier from here on out. The Colts are no pushovers and are coming off a bye of their own, although Daniel Jones has struggled badly over the past two weeks. The Chiefs get the Cowboys, Titans and Raiders on the road between now and the end of the year, and while there’s no such thing as a gimme game for a 5-5 team, the 2025 Chiefs have dominated bad teams in a way that the 2024 Chiefs did not.

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The Chiefs’ tougher games — the Colts, Texans, Chargers and that rematch with the Broncos — are all at Arrowhead. That’s a fortuitous turn of events. It wouldn’t be a shock if the Chiefs were favored in each of their seven remaining games. (Although that doesn’t mean they’ll win all seven.)

More than anything, though, the evidence suggests that this is a pretty good football team that has had some very poor timing or sequencing. There isn’t any dominant team in the AFC. The Broncos deserved to win on Sunday and have a fantastic defense, but Nix has been incredibly inconsistent, and Denver has needed late comebacks to beat the likes of the Giants and Jets. The Bills have been sloppy and lost to the Falcons and Dolphins. The Ravens nearly handed a win to the Browns on Sunday. The Chargers were blown out by the Jaguars. The Colts haven’t been able to protect the football of late. The Patriots have played one of the easiest schedules in recent memory.

I wrote at length about many of these teams last week, and these are obviously simplistic one-line analyses. But there’s no team with the sort of undeniable résumé we’ve seen from the great teams in the AFC in past years. Their record is disappointing, but I’m not sure the Chiefs are really much worse than any or all of those teams.

And while they’re not going to suddenly start winning 100% of their close games again, keep in mind that regression toward the mean doesn’t suggest that a 10-0 team in one-score games is going to go 0-10 the following year. The simplest math would expect the Chiefs to win 50% of their close games. I would probably expect that their true talent level and win rate in those one-score contests is a little higher than 50-50. If they play five more one-score games from here on out, the Chiefs are more likely to finish 3-2 in those games than 0-5 or 5-0.

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Can they still win the Super Bowl?

As someone who perennially picks the Chiefs to win the Lombardi Trophy — even in years where I simultaneously project their regular-season record to decline — I have to finish up by weighing this side of the equation. If the top tier in the AFC is really a blurry mess and I believe the Chiefs can still be part of it, it doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest that they could get hot and seriously compete in the postseason, as teams quarterbacked by the likes of Allen and Rodgers have done in the past.

Has any team ever gone from 5-5 to a Super Bowl title? Well, one. When I talked about Brady earlier, I didn’t mention his 2001 Patriots, since Brady was a rookie and took over for an injured Drew Bledsoe in Week 2. A loss to the Rams dropped the Patriots to 5-5 in mid-November, but it was the last time Bill Belichick’s team would come up short that season. The Patriots won their final six games of the regular season to finish 11-5 and claim a first-round bye. You’re probably familiar with what happened next. This ends with an upset victory over Warner’s Rams in the Super Bowl.

The 2011 Giants were 6-6 before they got hot and won their second title over Brady’s Patriots, and the 1979 Rams made it to the Super Bowl and lost after starting 5-5. But there’s a reason teams without winning records this late into the season typically aren’t seen deep into the postseason: They usually aren’t very good. The Chiefs might be better than most, but going on the road and winning three times in January is a lot more difficult than hosting two games at Arrowhead. The Chiefs can pull it off if everything coalesces, but it seems more likely that they ride a luckier run of results down the stretch into the playoffs and come up short somewhere before Santa Clara.

Mahomes and this Chiefs team are better than their record, but they might have already done too much damage to make it back to another title game this season.