I’ve been thinking hard about Sunday night.
The Kansas City Chiefs got smoked by the Seattle Seahawks, suffering one of the worst losses of the Patrick Mahomes-Andy Reid era. But what does an ugly 20-3 loss on the road to the reigning Super Bowl champions really tell us about this team?
On the surface, things look grim.
The Chiefs went to Seattle with a chance to cement themselves as the best team in the NFL. A win over the reigning champs and a perfect 6-0 record would make it hard to argue they were anything but.
Instead, Kansas City got dominated from start to finish, enduring a loss so bad and so comprehensive that it almost cancels out the five wins the Chiefs already had on the board.
So, what are the Chiefs really? Are they the team we thought of a week ago that was ranked as one of the league’s best, or are they a paper tiger that was exposed by a genuine Super Bowl contender?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The Chiefs’ first five games made them look better than they were, while the loss to Seattle made them look worse than they are.
The Chiefs' perfect start masked some legitimate concerns
Kansas City looked good in its first five games. The run game was explosive and reliable. The passing attack was functional. Patrick Mahomes looked healthy. The offensive line was getting by. The defense looked stout. It wasn’t perfect, but the Chiefs were able to win in ways they couldn’t last year.
But it’s fair to say now that at least some of that success was a product of the teams the Chiefs were facing.
Kansas City’s opponents in Weeks 1-5 have a combined 11-22 record this season. Two of KC’s wins came over the then-winless Miami Dolphins and the still-winless Los Angeles Chargers, while just one was against a playoff team from last season in the Denver Broncos.
Sure, the Chiefs were able to handle business and show real flashes of brilliance at times, too, but they were doing so against bad teams. Could they do the same against the toughest opponent they’d faced yet? Clearly not.
Seattle exposed the Chiefs' weaknesses in a big way
The Seattle game showed that KC’s strengths still have limitations, and its weaknesses might have a bigger downside than Chiefs fans had hoped.
The ground game had been Kansas City’s biggest weapon, but it was stopped cold by a Seahawks defense that hasn’t allowed a 100-yard rusher in 36 consecutive games, and we saw the 2025 version of Mahomes, not the 2023 edition he’d looked like so far this season.
The weaknesses were relentlessly exploited. An O-line with two backup tackles allowed pressure on a whopping 53% of snaps, and a depleted wide receiver room missing two of its key pieces had six catches for 39 yards combined.
L’Jarius Sneed was targeted continuously until he was benched, and the kicker with the most misses in the league since the start of last season was off the mark not once but twice. There were drops, penalties, bad throws, missed tackles—everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
One ugly loss doesn't erase the Chiefs' potential
But while the Chiefs had a terrible game, this doesn’t mean they are suddenly a bad team.
Not every game is going to be like this. The Chiefs won’t face a defense as good as Seattle’s each week, Jaylon Moore and Rashee Rice could return from injury as soon as Sunday, and I’m betting Kenneth Walker’s tough game was the exception and not the norm.
Almost all of the strengths that led the Chiefs to five straight wins still remain, and Kansas City still has time and the means to address its weaknesses, with some of the answers already potentially on its roster. Are the Chiefs flawed? Sure, but every team is in some way.
The loss to the Seahawks showed that maybe the sky might not be the limit for this Chiefs team as it stands right now, but it doesn’t mean that the sky is falling either.
Maybe this team isn’t going to go 13-4 and cruise to the No. 1 seed in the AFC, but it’s still good enough to win the AFC West, make a playoff run, and return to the Super Bowl. Everything is still in its hands.
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