Sportsnet is breaking down everything you need to know about each of the 32 teams—including why you should or shouldn’t be rooting for them this season—leading up to NFL kickoff. Today, the Kansas City Chiefs.
Last year’s record: 9-7 (no playoffs, but they did spoil the Chargers’ season in Week 17, so that’s… something)
Head coach: Andy Reid
Core players: Justin Houston and Tamba Hali (LB/DE), Jeremy Maclin (WR), Jamaal Charles (RB), Derrick Johnson (LB), Eric Berry (S)
2015 is about… Attacking downfield. And actually succeeding at it. The Chiefs feel they have the talent to hang with Peyton Manning and the Broncos, and they know they’re a better, more balanced team than Philip Rivers and the Chargers… so why hasn’t it translated to more than a first-round loss in 2013 and an early off-season last year?
The answer, so far in Reid’s tenure as coach at least, can be largely chalked up to the almost total lack of a threatening passing game. As you may well have heard if you watched roughly six minutes of any Chiefs game in the second half of 2014, Kansas City finished the season without a single touchdown from a wide receiver.
That is obscenely hard to do — but it’s not as hard as you might think when you have no receivers capable of gaining downfield separation and a quarterback that is almost pathologically afraid of testing his arm. A brief example: Alex Smith started 15 games for Kansas City last year (sitting out a meaningless — for the Chiefs at least — Week 17 tilt). During those 15 games, he attempted 464 passes, and completed 303 of them. Of those 464 pass attempts, a full 24 of them (or just 5.2 percent) were targeted at least 20 yards downfield.
In 2014, only 75 NFL players (including a bunch of non-QBs) attempted at least one 20-plus yard pass — of those players only Jimmy Garoppolo (3.7 percent) looked deep less often, and Garoppolo only attempted 27 passes total. If the Chiefs are going to press for the division in 2015, they’ll need at least the spectre of the deep ball to keep defenders honest.
They lost… The biggest name among outgoing Chiefs is WR Dwayne Bowe, but as previously mentioned the Chiefs couldn’t score a touchdown with him as their top pass-catcher, so what are they really losing? Far more devastating a loss is the serious back surgery needed by defensive tackle Dontari Poe, who became a legitimate monster in the middle last season and — while he’s still on the roster — is likely out until at least late November, making a defence that was suspect against the run last season even more vulnerable.
Yeah, but they got… Maclin gives Smith an immediate upgrade in his top target. While Bowe looked slow and sluggish last season, Maclin returned from a season lost to an ACL injury to rack up statistics in the Eagles high-flying offence. He won’t duplicate his 85-catch, 1,318-yard, 10-touchdown season, but he’ll give Smith much bigger windows into which to aim downfield targets and can be counted on to stretch the field and move the chains. Reid’s top draft pick, CB Marcus Peters, should also begin to slowly take on snaps, with an eye to starting in 2016. Meanwhile, veteran safety Tyvon Branch can be a huge upgrade…if he can stay healthy. He’s played only five games in the past two seasons combined.
Growing from within: As 2014 wound down with nothing but zeroes on the board at receiver, Reid looked outside the box for help, and may have found a gem in Albert Wilson. Wilson is severely undersized at 5-foot-9, but clocks in at a sturdy 200 pounds. and was able to get free with surprising regularity for an undrafted free agent. His 16.3 average length of reception is all the more startling when you think of just how infrequently Smith would have dared to throw the ball that far. The biggest in-house explosion, though, might come from tight end Travis Kelce, who looked absolutely dominant at times last season, with receiver-level speed, sure hands and the ability to make tough catches in traffic. Obviously there’s only one Rob Gronkowski, but if we had to pick a TE to be the Next Best Thing, it’d be Kelce.
Why this team? Because the Chiefs, despite the weaknesses listed above, can do some things better than almost anyone else in football. You want to watch edge rushers knife through a line like butter? Hali and Houston might be the best duo in the game for that. You love it when a running back explodes out of the backfield and into the secondary and embarrasses every defender who tries to tackle him? Charles is capable of taking it to the house on any snap.
Reid’s coaching is both inventive and maddening all at once, Kelce looks like a difference maker and safety Eric Berry, diagnosed with lymphoma last year, has fought back hard and seems poised to become one of the best feel-good stories of the early season.
Why not? Because, sigh, Alex Smith is the plain yogurt of NFL quarterbacks. His zero-risks, zero-turnovers approach is good for you — appealing to coaches and game managers and probably risk-averse investment bankers, but it legitimately sucks to watch your team line up at scrimmage time and time again to know with hard evidence that there’s a 94.8-percent chance that the play is either a run or a short, safe check down. Ugh.
Perfect for fans of… Star athletes winning games on their own. Whether it’s Charles on offence or the Houston/Hali duo on defence, KC is a team that relies on its stars as game breakers and its non-stars as game managers perhaps more than any other playoff-hopeful team in football.
How much hope? 7/10. Was it really all Alex Smith’s fault that the downfield game was so absent last year? If Maclin can become the field-stretcher that Bowe wasn’t, there are enough pieces in place here for the Chiefs to make a run.
Will you be mocked for front-running? Nope! There’s only one front-runner in this division, and it’s the Broncos—at least in the regular season.
A Meme To Remember: This isn’t a meme, per se, but it is funny and true—at least unless you’re a Chiefs fan. AMND stands for Air Minus Needs Differential—in other words, how many yards the ball travelled in the air, subtracted by the number of yards required at the time for a first down or touchdown. Obviously, this being football, you should try to throw the ball further than the first down marker most of the time, especially on third down. Alex Smith, it appears, does not believe in that theory.
