NFL picks: Kansas City Chiefs begin to earn true respect from experts
By Jacob Harris
The Chiefs are facing another AFC contender in primetime but K.C. is finally earning significant respect from the experts.
If there ever was a loss that actually elevated the stock of a squad, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Week 6 Sunday Night Football loss to the New England Patriots was just that for KC’s offense. A 43-40 shootout that came down to the last second, the game showed that Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs could stand punch-for-punch with Tom Brady and the Patriots.
Not surprisingly, the Chiefs are expected to quickly wash the taste of that loss out of their mouths this Sunday night as the Cincinnati Bengals come into Arrowhead. Despite the Bengals playing much better football on both sides of the ball this season, the experts across the media are very, very heavily favoring the Chiefs to win this week.
For K.C., a primetime game at home against a team that has had almost pathological struggles in games under the lights in recent years feels like a gift. Andy Dalton has been historically bad on Sunday Night Football in particular, and there’s no reason to believe having to play in Arrowhead is going to cure him of his career goose egg in the win column on SNF.
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Over the last six weeks, this article has broken down ESPN’s and CBS’s picks, covering which experts leaned which way. This week, the breakdown is simple. It goes as follows:
All Chiefs.
All Chiefs.
For the first time this season, it’s a clean sweep in favor of the Chiefs. This feels like a shift in the AFC landscape as far as perception goes. For K.C. to be so universally favored against a Bengals team that has been tough in 2018 is a strong indication that even everyone outside of Kansas City is starting to take this team seriously as a contender.
As for FiveThirtyEight, the Chiefs are sitting pretty with a 76% win probability. They also remain FiveThirtyEight’s favorites to win the Super Bowl, albeit with their likelihood dropping from 16% to 14%.
This game is the exact type of game the Chiefs teams of recent years would lose. Just when they hook the rest of the world they’d embarrass themselves. If nothing else, Sunday night will be an opportunity for the Chiefs to continue to shed the past and build a new reputation—a team that isn’t just a threat on any given Sunday but is firmly entrenched as the top of their conference.
They won’t be able to rid themselves of being the ultimate “How are they gonna blow it this year?” team until the playoffs roll around, but they can make doing that a lot easier by making sure the playoffs run through Arrowhead. Beating the Bengals is a small step toward that.