Why KC Chiefs vs. Bengals will be very different this time around

The Kansas City Chiefs will take the field with a chance to advance to the Super Bowl for the fourth straight year on Sunday. That’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write when I started writing for Arrowhead Addict a decade ago, and I hope we as Chiefs fans never start taking that for granted. That having been said, while making AFC Championship games is great, Super Bowls are what really count, and the team standing between the Chiefs and their third straight trip to the Super Bowl is the Cincinnati Bengals.

The Bengals are a fantastic story. A team that has bounced back and forth between awful and just good enough to make the playoffs, but never win a playoff game for decades. Now they find themselves ahead of schedule with an offense that is incredibly talented and incredibly young. The quartet of Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, and Joe Mixon is as good of a young offensive nucleus as you can find in the NFL and the Bengals have not only won a couple of playoff games now but find themselves just one win away from the Super Bowl.

What’s more, the Bengals have already beat the Chiefs just a few weeks back. That win was no meaningless game either. The Chiefs were playing for the overall top seed in the AFC and the bye that comes with it and the Bengals were trying to clinch the AFC North division. The Bengals won that game 34-31. So some might think that they would come into this game feeling supremely confident and that Chiefs fans should be terrified of this hot, young team.

Well in the words of Lee Corso, not so fast my friends.

If you look at how that first game played out, I actually think there are numerous reasons (five to be exact) that based on how that game went the Chiefs are the team that should be feeling great about this rematch. Let’s start with one of the obvious ones.