Chiefs face make or break in Oakland

First things first – this is not 2015. Four games under .500 isn’t going to cut it this year, and there are a lot of reasons why. The upcoming schedule is more daunting, the team is missing some of the pieces that made it so great last year, and they haven’t shown an ability to be consistently decent at even one thing – let alone good at a few.

And yes, I can math real good – I realize losing this week doesn’t put the Chiefs four games under .500. But as I previously mentioned, there are a lot of problems plaguing this team. The one that has me most concerned, though? Somebody broke Andy Reid.

Reid is an offensive genius. That’s more than just a clichéd, time-filler comment used by analysts around the league – it’s an objective fact. But there’s always an inevitable drawback to mad genius. Occasionally, you get a lot more “mad” and a lot less “genius.” To articulate this point, I’m going borrow from some Christopher Nolan films.

Doug Pederson had success against the Steelers, and Andy Reid… um… didn’t. But Pederson merely adopted the screen – Andy Reid was born in it. Heck, it was even so much a screen as it was a screen within a screen. 1st and 10? Screen. 2nd and long? Screen. 3rd and anything? Screen. The dog ate some chocolate? Screen.

It was like Reid forgot that it was legal to throw the ball vertically. And that’s really weird, considering they did so on the first two plays, and were wildly successful doing so. After those two plays, the “genius” seemed to be all dried up – and we were left with an over-sized dose of “mad.” There were a couple of layers to the madness, too.