What is the longest winning streak in Kansas City Chiefs history?
By Matt Conner
As good as the Kansas City Chiefs have been in these last handful of seasons with Patrick Mahomes as the starting quarterback, an impressive winning streak can be tough to put together. For a team like the Chiefs, any regular season game is termed as one of the biggest matchups of the year for that opponent, since K.C. is the very measure of a champion in the current era.
This means that the Chiefs face the very best of every team, week in and week out. In a league known for parity and where the maxim is that any team can win on "any given Sunday", this makes the Chiefs' level of sustained success all the more impressive.
While winning on a yearly basis is quite difficult already, doing so on a weekly basis for any considerable length of team is next to impossible. That's why it's so tough to generate significant win streaks in the National Football League. Injuries and luck, rest and weather all play major roles, and sometimes it's even better for a team to rest its starters or certain players, which makes keeping a win streak alive all the more difficult.
So what is the longest win streak in Chiefs history? And how does that compare to other streaks around the NFL?
The longest win streak in Chiefs history actually came during the team's first Super Bowl run in 50 seasons, back when Mahomes and Travis Kelce were getting their first taste of championship glory. The streak of victories began in that magical 2019 season with a 24-17 win over the Chargers in a divisional matchup on November 18. The Chiefs would not lose again—whether at home or the road, in the regular season or the playoffs—for another 13 games.
It was the Raiders, another AFC West rival, that shocked the Chiefs in Week 5 on October 11, 2020 with a 40-32 victory that featured two Chiefs touchdowns nullified by penalties. The Raiders took their famous victory lap around Arrowhead that night and celebrated like they'd won the Super Bowl. Just like that, a 13-game win streak was over—the longest in franchise history.
What's interesting is if the Chiefs could have won that game, they went on to also win their next 10 games thereafter—which is their third-longest win streak ever. Suffice it to say, if they'd just put away the Raiders, the Chiefs would have potentially had a 24-game winning streak. The next loss, by the way, was a final regular season game in which they rested their starters against the Chargers.
The NFL's longest ever streak, including games in the regular season and postseason, belongs to the New England Patriots who had 21 consecutive victories between the 2003-04 seasons. As for consecutive victories in the postseason, that mark also belongs to the Patriots (surprise!) from 2001 to 2005 in Tom Brady's earliest seasons.
Surprisingly the longest streak of regular season wins comes via the Indianapolis Colts who won a whopping 23 straight games from 2008-09 with Peyton Manning at the helm. It goes to show that the Colts might have enjoyed themselves a lot more if they'd not played in the same conference as Brady and Bill Belichick for all those seasons.
As for the Chiefs, they're actually on a bit of a hot streak at the current moment, having won their last six games from the regular season to Super Bowl LIV. Starting with this year's season-opening game against the Baltimore Ravens, they can start a new impressive streak with their seventh straight win to kick off the schedule.
Maybe another win streak will be forged in the weeks to come.