Exasperating as it was when the Chiefs lost 36-35 at Baltimore after a startling event, Clyde Edwards-Helaire’s first fumble in the NFL, it also was reasonable to rationalize it as a fluke or a blip.
But that festered into an anxiety-inducing trend a week later against the Chargers, when the Chiefs began mass-producing turnovers with a jaw-dropping three straight to open the game at Arrowhead Stadium.
A fourth, on a rare miscommunication between the mind-merged Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, set up the decisive Los Angeles touchdown in the 30-24 loss.
Their first losing streak in two seasons left the Chiefs 1-2 and perhaps most strikingly in last place in the AFC West, which they’d monopolized with five straight titles.
All of a sudden, this was the Bizarro version of the Chiefs we’d come to know in the Mahomes era, the teams that had made you feel late-game rallies were a birthright.
The teams that seldom, if ever, defeated themselves, especially not with turnovers, and were completed by top 10 scoring defenses during back-to-back Super Bowl runs.
Other losses would soon follow, including a 38-20 bruising by Buffalo and a 27-3 straitjacketing at Tennessee with many of the same earmarks that left the Chiefs staggering at 3-4.
But as the Chiefs (9-4) prepare for the pivotal rematch against the Chargers (8-5) on Thursday at SoFi Stadium, that first encounter looms large. It both epitomized their early glitches and makes for a keen point of contrast to what’s happened since.
And that speaks to why this one figures to go differently for the Chiefs, though X-factors such as the recent spike in NFL players being placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list (including Chris Jones and Josh Gordon of the Chiefs) could change the calculus.
Because even if it was easy to shrug off his point then, Mahomes had it right after that game: “We’ll find ourselves,” Mahomes said after the Chiefs, incidentally, amassed 33 first downs and 437 yards. “We’ll find ourselves over time.”
It took a longer time than anyone with or for the Chiefs might have liked. And you wouldn’t even now say everything is fixed or that this team has arrived even as it enters the game tied with the Patriots and Titans for the best record in the AFC.
But you sure can say with conviction that this team is surging and playing complementary football and moving back toward being “who we thought we could be,” as safety Tyrann Mathieu put it after the Chiefs swamped the Raiders 48-9 on Sunday for their sixth straight win.
Said Chargers coach Brandon Staley, “3-4 went to 9-4 pretty fast, and that’s because of what they are capable of. I think that you see the full version of that team.”
Indeed, the full version of this Chiefs team, or at least the more full version of this team, is stacking wins on top of wins because of drastic differences on both sides of the ball since these two last met.
While it remains to be seen if the offense can get back to scoring big against anyone but the Raiders, Mahomes was particularly sharp last week (20 of 24, 258 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions). And the Chiefs flexed their running game again for 132 yards as the reformed offensive line continues to get more cohesive and in sync with Mahomes overall.
Oh, and the stupefying season-long binge of dropped passes stopped … at least for a day.
Which brings us to the single thing about the offense that has changed most, enough so that it seems back to its normal habits in the Reid era: The Chiefs handed out 17 turnovers in their first seven games, one fewer than the most a Reid-coached Chiefs team ever had committed over a 16-game season.
Among those were some of the six (perhaps seven, depending on who’s doing the scoring) interceptions that have caromed off a Chief first this season … including one that went off Marcus Kemp on the opening drive of the first meeting after the Chiefs had moved 63 yards on nine plays.
With the defense sputtering, that left the Chiefs minus-10 in turnovers in that 3-4 start.
In the six-game winning streak, though, the Chiefs have committed a total of six turnovers — and just four, as many as they handed over to the Chargers that day, in the last five games.
That’s no guarantee they won’t suddenly let loose with the ball again. Taking such details for granted, offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy said, “can come back and bite you right in the tail.”
But this sure counts as a trend and what might be considered a reversion to the mean and the form Reid’s Chiefs teams have been about.
Then there’s the defense, which has gone from liability to something like a revelation. The unit charged with 203 points through seven games has given up 65 in six games since. It’s given up just 27 points in the last three games … while scoring two touchdowns itself.
In fact, just as the offense stopped giving the ball away, the defense started taking it: In these last six games, the Chiefs are plus-10 in turnovers with the defense snarfing up 16.
This happened for a lot of reasons. But paramount has been the return of Frank Clark, inserting Juan Thornhill for Daniel Sorensen, the acquisition of Melvin Ingram (a former Charger) enabling Chris Jones to move back inside and the emergence of L’Jarius Sneed (whose status remains unclear for Thursday even after he returned to the team Tuesday following the death of his brother last week).
But there’s also a cohesion that’s been built over time, one that we might have all assumed should have been there from the get-go but wasn’t. Even from afar, Staley offered an astute perspective on how defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo seems to have “figured out that sweet spot for his team.”
“I think, more than anything, it’s just getting comfortable within their coverage systems and what they like to play. Sometimes it takes some time to figure out exactly what that is,” Staley said.
And playing like a team, period. One that shouldn’t undermine itself like it did over and over early in the season.
“You never want to feel like we did in those particular moments, because we felt like we lost a game more than some of those teams won the game,” Bieniemy said. “But that’s a part of the nature of this business. You can’t take anything for granted.”