The Chiefs Are So Good, They're Almost Boring
The Chiefs are kinda boring.
Outside of the win over the Baltimore Ravens, they’ve spent half of an NFL season on what feels like cruise control. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It more-or-less means the Chiefs are winning with boring football because they can. Why pull out the good playbook when you could probably beat most teams using the playbook from Tecmo Bowl?
I guess this is what it feels like when your team is truly great? There’s so little tension on Sundays anymore. Even when they were awful, there was the worry they’d never escape it.
Until this year, the entirety of my football-watching life has been tinged with the gnawing anxiety of feeling as if the Chiefs were walking a tightrope between skyscrapers every week. Unless a game got particularly out of hand, every snap felt like it had the weight of the entire season on it. The amount of real, physical discomfort the Chiefs have caused me on a weekly basis over my lifetime is immeasurable. But that’s the nature of football. It’s a visceral sport you experience with gut emotion.
But now, everything is so matter-of-fact. Nothing feels difficult or tense. It’s all just so expected now. Even Mahomes throwing on the run, across his body, between multiple defenders feels so casual it may as well be a handoff up the middle. It's only been a couple of seasons, but extraordinary isn't even an expectation. It's a given.
Watching the Chiefs, it’s obvious they aren’t playing at full speed. Yet they’re still wiping the floor with the Texans, Broncos, and Jets of the world. Their closer games and single loss haven’t felt like representations of what this team will be when the playoffs roll around.
This season is the first time in my life that I’ve taken a nap in the middle of a Chiefs game when they were winning. It’s not that I’m not invested, I’m just being a fan at the same speed the Chiefs are winning their games.
They scored 35 points against the Jets, which included over 400 yards and five touchdowns from Patrick Mahomes, and it felt like they weren’t even trying. That game felt like the Chiefs could have easily scored in the 50s. It was the most nonchalant offensive explosion I think I’ve ever seen.
Looking ahead, there aren’t a lot of games that promise a fully awakened Chiefs team. Outside of the Buccaneers, they could sleepwalk the rest of the way through the season and go 15-1. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll embarrass the Raiders when they face them again, just to make it clear the last time didn’t really count.
None of this is complaining. It’s just weird. It takes some getting used to. This team isn’t just a level of great that’s rare for the franchise, it’s rare for the sport. They’re like the kid in class who is so impossibly smart he makes you question your entire life’s value, but you at least know it’s inevitable he’s going to get moved up so you won’t have to look dumb anymore. Except there’s nowhere for the Chiefs to move up to, and the rest of the league just is stuck looking dumb, haplessly trying to imitate their playcalling. But that also means the Chiefs can get away with winning without doing a whole lot until the games actually start counting.
The Super Bowl erased a tension that had built for five decades. That tension bled into every game the Chiefs played. Now, that tension is gone and that specific mountaintop cannot be reached again. Any future Super Bowls will be a different sort of satisfaction.
