KC Chiefs have lots of blame to assign for frustrating loss to Bengals

Bad Officiating

I won’t sugarcoat it. The officiating in this game was terrible and it felt like the Chiefs were on the wrong end of most of the bad calls. That having been said, I want to make two things perfectly clear. First, I don’t believe for a second that the game was “rigged” and that anything was done to intentionally hurt the Chiefs’ chances to win the game. I think it makes us as Chiefs fans look bad when we claim otherwise. If anything, the league should want a team with arguably the brightest young quarterback star they’ve seen in years to win.

Second, despite the bad calls, if the Chiefs didn’t have the issues in the next several points on this list, they would have won this game anyway. In other words, all three of these things can be simultaneously true: the Bengals did things that helped them win the game, the Chiefs did things to lose the game, and the officials had some bad calls that hurt the Chiefs. Just focusing on the officials lets the Chiefs off the hook for the issues they had that could have prevented this loss.

That all said, I’ll give you that this was one of the most frustrating games I’ve watched from an officiating standpoint. The horrible pass interference calls against the Chiefs’ defense combined with the lack of calls against the Bengals for the same or more contact was infuriating. The horse-caller call on Sneed, the no-call for offensive pass interference on one of Ja’Marr Chase’s touchdowns when there was a clear push-off, the penalty on Chris Jones that was clearly a false start by Joe Burrow, and the missed false start on one of the Bengals guards at the goal line that would have likely led to the Bengals having to kick an FG earlier and giving the Chiefs a chance to respond. It was bad. I HATE blaming officials for losses, but even I have to admit that it was PART of the storyline of this game. It just wasn’t the only storyline that mattered.

The Chiefs did plenty to lose this game themselves, including some killer penalties that were on them. Just cleaning up the unnecessary penalties that weren’t bad calls might have been enough to swing the outcome of such a close game. I almost made that a separate point on this post, but I’ve got enough other things to vent about. So let’s move on to some issues with the defensive calls.