Kansas City Chiefs: Is coaching and continuity enough?

With the excitement of free agency and the NFL Draft now subsiding, many fans of the Kansas City Chiefs are trying to figure out just how good this year’s team can be. The NFL is notorious for quick turnover. Sometimes it feels like if you blink, you may miss an entire coach’s tenure with a team. It’s not just a coaching staff, either, entire front offices can turnover multiple times in the span of a few short seasons. And each staff change brings drastic overhauls to a team’s roster.

That is why the 2017 Kansas City Chiefs are such an abnormality in today’s NFL. While most teams see substantial changes from year to year, the Chiefs are going into next season with about as little change as we have seen in the last decade. The Chiefs were a very good team last year. Going 12-4 and winning the AFC West was great. However, everything came to a screeching halt in the playoffs. Most NFL teams would have focused on adding those “missing pieces” that would get them over the hump next year, but that’s not the path the Chiefs have taken. Instead they seem to believe that improvement will come through coaching, player development, and continuity.

The question then obviously becomes, can the Chiefs improve enough from these things to be a contender in 2017?

Before we answer that question, perhaps we should address another. Are the Chiefs actively trying to win a Super Bowl this season, or are they just trying to field a competitive team while they train what they hope will be their star quarterback of the future in Patrick Mahomes? Let me be clear: I believe wholeheartedly that the Chiefs want and believe they can win in 2017. I did not see their relative inactivity in free agency and investment in Patrick Mahomes as a sign of hopelessness for this coming season. Based on what I’ve read online, it seems that not everyone agrees with me. Some people seem to feel that this team has too many holes that the Chiefs seemed to ignore this offseason and that has them pessimistic about the Chiefs prospects in 2017.

Before the draft I went on record as saying that the Chiefs could afford to move up in the draft to get their quarterback because their roster was in such good shape. I believed that then and I still believe it now. While there are definitely positions where the Chiefs can get better, there isn’t a single position on this team that I have huge concerns about. John Dorsey has done a fantastic job of putting together a complete roster from top to bottom and I trust that he will continue to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of finding players that can help make it even stronger.

I believe the Chiefs trust their roster and trust their coaching staff even more. I think they believe that the coaching staff can continue to develop the talent on their roster so that this team gets better without having to add a bunch of new starters.

Let’s look at a few of the places those improvements may be most likely to come in 2017.