play0:28Jaleel McLaughlin powers into the end zone for Broncos’ TDJaleel McLaughlin gets some help from his teammates to find the end zone for Denver.
play0:32Kareem Hunt finds the end zone for Kansas CityKareem Hunt stays upright and ties the game for the Chiefs with a rushing touchdown.
Broncos win eighth straight after taking down Chiefs (1:18)Broncos get a game-winning field goal by Wil Lutz to take down the Chiefs for their eighth win in a row. (1:18)
Jaleel McLaughlin powers into the end zone for Broncos’ TDJaleel McLaughlin gets some help from his teammates to find the end zone for Denver.
Kareem Hunt finds the end zone for Kansas CityKareem Hunt stays upright and ties the game for the Chiefs with a rushing touchdown.
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.
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.
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.
Leaving the second Broncos game aside, the 2024 Chiefs won by an average of 6.1 points per game. Through 10 weeks, these 2025 Chiefs actually have a better point differential, winning by an average of 7.3 points per contest. They’ve lost the close ones, but their five victories have come by an average of 19 points, including substantial wins over the 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.
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.
This season, the defense allowed 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 …
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.
Jaleel McLaughlin powers into the end zone for Broncos’ TD
Jaleel McLaughlin gets some help from his teammates to find the end zone for Denver.
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.
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.
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.)
Kareem Hunt stays upright and ties the game for the Chiefs with a rushing touchdown.
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.
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.
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.)
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.