Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs have remarkably stormed to a 9-0 record despite the team’s general lethargy on the offense side of the football.
Each game seems to follow a similar script: the Chiefs play down to an inferior opponent, slowly come back, and end up winning by the skin of their teeth. In three of the team’s first four games of the year – against the Cincinnati Bengals, Atlanta Falcons, and Los Angeles Chargers – Kansas City had win probabilities under 50 percent deep into the fourth quarter, per The 33rd Team.
In Week 2’s 26-25 win over the Bengals, Mahomes and Co. had just a 15.5 percent chance to claim victory at one point in the fourth quarter before Harrison Butker homered the game-winning boot as the clock expired.
The Chiefs are a perfect 7-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer this season, far and away the best in the entire NFL. Meanwhile, a nearly identical Chiefs team went just 4-4 in contests decided by the same margin just a year ago.
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The 13-4 2022 Minnesota Vikings went a remarkable 11-0 in one-score contests to lose to the Daniel Jones-led New York Giants in the playoffs. In 2023, the team regressed to 7-10.
If we look underneath the hood, the 2024 Chiefs do not have the elite underlying numbers to match their record. Their +58 point differential is good for ninth in the league and slightly better than the 6-3 Green Bay Packers.
Their total-team DVOA is third at 24.5 percent, but the gap between them and the first-place Detroit Lions is the same as the gap between the Chiefs and the 17th-ranked Atlanta Falcons.
Will Lutz’s potential game-winning field goal was blocked by Chiefs defender Leo Chenal (
Image:
Getty Images)
Kansas City narrowly survived 27-20 in Week 1 against a fearsome Ravens team when Baltimore tight end Isaiah Likely’s potential game-tying touchdown was deemed an inch out-of-bounds. Postgame, Likely indicated the Ravens would have gone for two and for the win should the score have counted.
The Chiefs prevailed in both Week 2 against the Bengals and Week 9 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on walk-off field goals by Butker.
And in Week 10, Kansas City defender Leo Chenal blocked a potential game-winning 35-yard Will Lutz field-goal try as time expired to clinch a 16-14 win over the Denver Broncos. The Broncos’ win probability was 80 percent before Lutz’s attempt to seal the deal failed.
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Despite the head coach, Broncos head coach Sean Payton seemed to think his side was better than the defending Super Bowl champions. “Thought we outplayed them,” Payton admitted. “Nonetheless, you’ve got to beat a champion, and we weren’t able to do it. Obviously gut-wrenching.”
ESPN writer Bill Barnwell always harps about how teams with impressive records in one-score games will eventually regress to the mean. He gave an example in a 2024 NFL prediction article: If we take the 73 [playoff] teams from 1989 to 2022 that outscored the teams they played by an average of between 0-1 points per game and see how they performed, just 11 of those teams produced double-digit win totals.”
“Unsurprisingly, they were 74-25 in one-score games that season. And also unsurprisingly, they went 40-43 in those same contests the following season.”
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