Chiefs vs. Ravens: What we learned in Week 3

The Class of the AFC

Ok, so before I dive in here, I need to give a little preamble. Years of watching the Chiefs has made me a bit stoic, even pessimistic at times. The recent success of the team has slowly undone a lot of the suffering of Chiefs pre-Mahomes. I don’t really get on hype trains or make sweeping generalizations. In fact, I picked the Ravens to win this game! I say this only because I want the rest of my comments to hold some weight.

This was the most impressive Chiefs game I have ever seen.

Now, the Super Bowl was a victory in a class of its own, and last year’s playoff heroics were simply remarkable. But I’m speaking strictly about the product on the field, the sixty minutes of football in itself.

Writing this piece, I’ve gone back and forth with how to describe what I saw last night. At first, I tried writing about how dominant the Chiefs were.  But this performance deserves a slightly more abstract, unusual reflective piece. Because, though the offense was brilliant, the defense suffocating this game felt spectacular in a different way. I think that this victory deserves an analysis that is a bit unusual, because the game was unusually great.

The Chiefs played doubtless football. They played like the convergence of every sports cliche in the lexicon. The simplest way for me to put it is that the game felt like practice, and I don’t mean that to discredit the efforts, stakes and urgency of the game. I’m saying it felt like “practice” because the game felt like it was about the Chiefs. It was as if the Chiefs hijacked “Monday Night Football” and turned it into a dazzling Chiefs practice, with bells and whistles. They did not simply defeat the Ravens; they destroyed the notion that this was a “game.”

The best analogy I can think of can be drawn from professional wrestling. The “squash match” in wrestling is when a wrestler demolishes another. A wrestler on whom the company is high is put in a match with another wrestler, and the sole purpose of the match is for the promoted wrestler to destroy the other one. But in wrestling, the wrestler who gets “squashed” knows he is in that match for the sole purpose of making the winning wrestler look good. He quite literally attempts to make the other wrestler look good, as best he can.

In wrestling, unlike football, the “squash” is designed, a way to market a new talent. In a sense, the Chiefs’ victory over Baltimore resembled a squash match. Patrick Mahomes, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, each wide receiver, and Travis Kelce seemed to all have their moments to shine.

On defense too, Chris Jones, Frank Clark, Juan Thornhill, Tyrann Mathieu and the like each earned a kind of spotlight moment. Where the analogy breaks, of course, is that the Ravens were not on the field in order to make the Chiefs look good. This was not a “designed” squash; the Chiefs’ win over the Ravens was totally organic. And yet, it was a win so resounding, it resembled destruction by design. And that, to put it modestly, is no small feat.

While it’s only Week 3, we should look back on this game as the kind of play the Chiefs can reach. The Chiefs’ ceiling is so high, they are capable of making a football game look like a whooping-by-design. Moving forward, an emphasis should be placed on revving up the energy and consistency across four quarters. So far, it seems like the rest is there.