The good and bad news for the 6-3 Kansas City Chiefs

Despite a rough patch heading into the bye week, there’s good news and bad news for the Kansas City Chiefs. Today, we discuss them all.

Week 10 approaches and the Kansas City Chiefs are headed into their annual bye week having lost the swagger that defined the first five games of their 2017 campaign. The team, losers of three of their last four contests, has ostensibly lost its way and appears to be a shell of its former “best team in the NFL” self. Questions abound about a defensive unit that is currently one of the league’s four-worst in terms of total yardage (29th), pass defense (28th) and run defense (30th). Kansas City’s offense has fared much better overall, but has recently been marred by inconsistency. One might say the bye week came at a perfect time for this football team.

The benefits of a bye week are negligible according to a 2014 study performed by Grantland’s Bill Barnwell. Though his research did conclude that winning percentage spiked to 55 percent for teams who did not play the previous week. SB Nation’s Louis Bien also studied the impact of NFL byes and Super Bowl winning teams between 2002-2013 had their breaks at roughly the midway point (Week 7.5 on average). Compared with the league average bye week (Week 6.93), it did appear to have some relationship with winning an NFL championship.

Bye weeks aside, there are other variables to consider with the 2017 Chiefs.