The Kansas City Chiefs had their first losing season in thirteen years and broke a streak of ten straight seasons making the NFL playoffs in 2025. Not only had the Chiefs made the playoffs for ten straight seasons, but they had been to seven straight conference championship games and five of the last six Super Bowls, winning three of them. It was one of the best runs in NFL history, and it was bound to end at some point; it’s just a shame it had to come to an end this season.
The NFL playoffs are wide open this year in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time. There are a bunch of very good teams, but no teams that are viewed as dominant Super Bowl threats or favorites, especially in the AFC. On Sunday, the biggest “name” quarterback in the playoffs this season, Josh Allen, just eked out a win in his Wild Card matchup with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Earlier in the weekend, one popular Super Bowl pick, the Los Angeles Rams, also needed a late game-winning drive to survive their matchup with an 8–9 Carolina Panthers team.
The bottom line here is that no other season in recent history has been this wide open. At the time of this writing, the Seattle Seahawks, a team quarterbacked by Sam Darnold, are the betting favorites to win the Super Bowl. The AFC’s two top seeds (the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots) are quarterbacked by second-year players who entered the playoffs without a single playoff win between them.
The Kansas City Chiefs wasted a golden opportunity to take advantage of a wide-open playoff field.
The Patriots and Drake Maye did win on Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers, but the game was far from dominant, at least from an offensive standpoint. While it’s possible the Denver Broncos prove to be a dominant playoff team, they didn’t even look like a dominant team in the regular season despite their 14–3 record. They ended their regular season with a 14-point loss to the Jaguars and then unimpressive wins over the Chiefs and Chargers, who were mostly playing their JV squads.
Then there is the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. They, too, didn’t look as good as their 11–6 record indicated, and that inconsistency showed up in their first playoff game as well. They lost to the San Francisco 49ers 23–19 on Sunday. Apparently, their talk about being the new NFL dynasty after knocking off the Chiefs proved harder to back up than they thought.
The Chiefs aren’t at home for the playoffs this season because the competition in the NFL became that much better; it’s because they fell off their previous level of success. That has to be that much more frustrating as they sit at home watching multiple playoff teams win games and advance—teams that previous iterations of the Chiefs would have clearly beaten. It’s just terrible timing that the Chiefs had to fall off at a time when there is no clear heir to their throne.
Hopefully, this motivates the Chiefs that much more. Hopefully, they see that there is still room at the top of the league for them to reassert themselves as a major Super Bowl threat if they can make smart decisions this offseason. It would only take a stable, Patrick Mahomes–led team to be one of the favorites in this year’s field of playoff teams. Kansas City would be foolish to try a long, drawn-out rebuild that wastes the prime years of Mahomes’ career.
That’s not to say that KC needs to try to band-aid the problems that have them picking ninth overall in the NFL Draft. What is actually needed is quick and decisive action regarding what caused the drop-off, so they can make the kind of significant changes that can fix the problem. If KC can be honest with itself and Brett Veach and Andy Reid can stabilize this team around Patrick Mahomes, there is no reason Chiefs fans shouldn’t be right back among the fans cheering on their team in the playoffs next season after wasting a golden opportunity to do so this year.