The Kansas City Chiefs offense (not defense) must be better

The Kansas City Chiefs lost a hard-fought battle against the Buffalo Bills 24-20 on Sunday. It was an up-and-down battle for the entire game, but it didn’t live up to the offensive shootout that it was billed to be. At the end of the day, you have to be happy with the Chiefs’ defense holding an offense like that to just 24 points. On the other hand, the offense has to shoulder the bulk of the blame for this loss for not being able to put up more points.

I’ll admit it, coming into the game I was worried that the Chiefs’ defense was missing too many pieces to slow down the Buffalo Bills’ offense. Not having Trent McDuffie, Reshod Fenton, Bryan Cook, and Willie Gay against a team that has an elite passing attack and weapons that attack every inch of the field scared me. My official score prediction for Arrowhead Addict was a 37-34 Bills win. While I got the winning team right and was only one point off on the point differential, the game didn’t play out as I expected.

The good news is that the defense actually performed much better than I expected. They kept the Bills in check for most of the game. Yes, they gave up a few big plays, but that’s going to happen when you are playing that offense, especially when you’re missing several key pieces. In fact, go back and watch all three of the Bills’ touchdowns, they were great plays by the Bills way more than they were bad defense by the Chiefs.

On the long Gabe Davis touchdown before halftime Spags sent the house to try and disrupt Josh Allen (something that worked a lot in this game) which left Joshua Williams on an island against Gabe Davis. Williams slipped just a little and that gave Davis all the space he needed to make the big play. On the touchdown to Stefon Diggs, Williams actually had pretty tight coverage, Diggs just made the play and on the final touchdown to Dawson Knox the Chiefs had Justin Reid trailing him pretty close, but Knox broke back towards the line of scrimmage and Allen put the ball right on him. I’m not mad at the Chiefs for any of those plays.

The Bills had nine drives in this game (not counting the final possession where they ran out the clock). Here are the results of those nine drives.

• Turnover
• Field Goal
• Turnover on Downs
• Punt
• Touchdown
• Touchdown
• Turnover on Downs
• Punt
• Touchdown

The Chiefs were going against one of the best offenses in football and they forced a turnover, got two turnovers on downs, and forced a couple of punts. That is about all you can ask of them. If you want to criticize Williams for giving up two touchdowns, I guess you can. If you want to nit-pick when Steve Spagnuolo blitzed when he used zone, and when he left the rookie corners alone in man coverage, I guess you can do that too, but his plan of attack is what helped them end five of Buffalo’s nine drives in an outright stop.

So now let’s flip over to the other side of the ball and talk about what the offense did when the defense made those stops.