Kansas City Chiefs need to treat the New England Patriots like any other game

The Kansas City Chiefs need to treat their upcoming game against the New England Patriots like a business trip and move on quickly either way.

This Kansas City Chiefs are probably going to beat the New England Patriots this weekend, and it won’t mean a thing.

For obvious reasons, the buildup to this game has carried a lot of weight. The two teams who met in last year’s classic and (for Chiefs fans) heart-eviscerating AFC Championship game rematch in the 2019 regular season in a game that could inch the Chiefs closer to sneaking into a playoff bye.

We are also in the midst of the annual “The Patriots are secretly not good and Tom Brady is cooked” portion of the year. It’s the collective delusion we put ourselves under every single season when the Patriots lose a couple games and don’t look completely infallible. A couple shots of Tom Brady looking dejected or frustrated on the sidelines is all we need to start casting their tombstone. Then the season ends, and Brady is hoisting another Lombardi as red and blue Patriots confetti rains on the field and we all sit there staring at our TVs, full-on surprised Pikachu.

We re-run this story over and over and over and fool ourselves into thinking it’s got a new ending every single year. We’re stupid. Eventually we’ll be right, but we’re still stupid.

Now, are the Patriots currently, despite being 10-2, in the midst of a very un-good stretch of football? Yes. Are the Chiefs in prime position to exploit this New England lull and notch yet another regular season win in the Andy Reid/KC belt? Absolutely. Will any of this mean anything come January? Nope.

There’re two things we know with certainty; Bill Belichick won’t be showing everything Sunday, and Andy Reid won’t be showing everything Sunday. This will be a contest of two teams who know they’ll likely be meeting again in the playoffs, trying to beat each other without exposing their entire hand.

The Patriots don’t need this win to hold onto their bye and the Chiefs need a lot more than this will to sneak back into a bye. It’s a game both teams desperately want, and it’s one that will be analyzed ad nauseum over the following week, but it’s one with a long-term impact that will only be felt in the location these teams meet again come the playoffs. And even that is true only if the Chiefs win out and the Patriots lose one more after this week to Bengals, Bills, or Dolphins—not exactly the likeliest of scenarios.

The Chiefs have yet to beat the Patriots with Patrick Mahomes starting at quarterback, which will likely be the big story coming out of this game, win or lose. If the Chiefs win, it’ll be Mahomes’ first big step in conquering Brady and the Patriots. If the Chiefs lose, there will be questions raised comparing Lamar Jackson and Deshaun Watson to Mahomes after the Ravens’ and Texans’ victories against the Patriots.

While there is some valid criticism of Mahomes to be handed out in his tendency to come out erratic or flat in primetime or nationally televised games that are billed as “big” or “important”, the whole concept of “QB wins” is inherently flawed. Those specific flaws have been covered a million times over, so I won’t dive in depth here, but attributing wins and losses to a QB’s resume at the level we tend to is the laziest form of analysis.

There’s a really, really, really good chance the Chiefs make the Patriots look silly on Sunday. That’s something they tend to do in regular season games in recent history. Much like some teams seem to relish in beating the Chiefs as a massive milestone, nearly every team that beats the Patriots react the same way.

The Chiefs can’t fall into that trap this year. They can’t treat a defeat of the Patriots in the regular season as any more or less meaningful than a defeat of the Detroit Lions or Jacksonville Jaguars. That trap leads straight to another year of watching the Patriots throw another parade. They don’t make rings for beating the Patriots in the regular season; that’s something even the Dolphins can do.

It’s a cliche to refer to a road game as a “business trip” in sports, but this game in New England should be best treated as that. There’s no emotion to get wrapped up in, and no amount of pre-game national hype should change the reality for the Chiefs that this game means nothing the moment it ends, win or lose. The only game against the Patriots that matters happens in January. That’s one of the secrets to long term success. Because no matter what happens on Sunday, we know one thing about New England: they’ll be on to Cincinnati.