Losing sleep, Part II; Are the flaws the Chiefs showed vs the Bills fixable?
We're losing sleep again. Yay.
Well, that was pretty ugly.
The Chiefs lost to the Bills 21-28 yesterday. On the surface, if one was to just look at the final score or final moments of the game, perhaps it doesn’t look that bad. After all, Kansas City only lost the game by a single score, and had several chance to try and win it at the end of the game. Frankly, after Patrick Mahomes hit Xavier Worthy to put the Chiefs on Buffalo’s 40-yard-line with 17 seconds remaining I was about 40% convinced they were going to somehow pull it off. All that screams like a close game.
However, for anyone watching the game, it didn’t LOOK close for much of it. Buffalo’s offense moved the ball with ease much of the afternoon, while Kansas City’s offense looked… well, like how it looked to open the season, and an awful lot like how it looked in 2023 and 2024. The eye test doesn’t always tell the truth, but sometimes it gets it right, as the advanced metrics showed following the game.
(h/t to Sumer Sports for the numbers)
Without going too far down a rabbit hole, these numbers generally try and track how effectively, efficiently, and consistently teams move the ball (or allow the ball to be moved). And the numbers back up what the eye test (and what film I’ve gone through so far) told us… While the final score was relatively close, this was not a particularly close game on a snap by snap basis. Buffalo moved the ball far more effectively, efficiently, and consistently through the air and was much better about utilizing an effective run game (the Chiefs ran the ball well, but just… didn’t do it much, which we’ll come back to).
And it doesn’t really boil down to just one individual issue. It also, and perhaps more concerningly, doesn’t come down to “don’t do dumb stuff” the way it did when they lost to Jacksonville. That loss was pretty much entirely self-inflicted. This was different. The Chiefs committed errors, sure, but they didn’t just hand the game over. They got beat in pretty much all phases of the game.
The pass offense, pass defense, and run defense all collected pretty clear “Ls” on the day. The only aspect of the team that perhaps played well, the run game, was utilized so scantly (especially the under center looks that had been working so well) that I’d still count it as a loss in terms of coaching. And speaking of that, both Andy Reid and Steve Spagnuolo overall appeared outcoached throughout the game. But at the end of the day it’s tough to think of a single Chiefs position group that had a “good” game overall against Buffalo. It was that sort of performance. And this far into the season, that’s concerning, especially given they’re now 5-4 and (at this moment) out of the playoff picture.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the season is on the line for the Chiefs the next two weeks. If they drop their games to Denver and Indianapolis, they’d be sitting at 5-6 and have no realistic shot at the division and a long road to even make the playoffs (basically, “win out and hope other teams lose”). I’ll come back to that at some point during the bye week, because it’s been a WHILE since November games have mattered this much in Kansas City.
But for now, I want to revisit my “sleeplessness factor” concept I used earlier this season following the Chiefs’ Week 1 loss to the Chargers. That game, similar to the Buffalo game, featured a pretty thorough whipping of Mahomes and company in multiple phases. I’m going to utilize basically the same methodology I did before, naming the flaw that looked to be exposed (maybe again, maybe for the first time) against Buffalo and then rating it on how much sleep I’ll be losing over the bye week… which is really to say “can this be fixed?”
Let’s get started with the first issue, which was the first issue in Week 1 as well (that’s an ominous start to be honest) and has, if anything, only gotten worse.
(Note: I have not, in fact, slept well lately, and so please forgive me in advance for the timing of this piece as well as any typos. I’ll just try to get better one week at a time, as they say)
Problem: The pass rush still looks anemic
Sleeplessness factor: It’s somehow worse than “I might as well have binged meth”
There are plenty of concerns surrounding the Chiefs right now, and I’ll be talking about the most important ones here. But none of them seem more dire and probably less fixable than the pass rush. And so that’s the one that’s going to get the most attention from me here in terms of analysis and video clips (one of which is going to make you absolutely irate for multiple reasons, and I apologize in advance)
Josh Allen completed over 88% of his passes against the Chiefs last night. That SOUNDS like a typo, but it’s not. And part of that was because Allen was able to comfortably sit in pockets for multiple seconds with only some movement and just… watch things develop down the field.
There’s so much wrong with this play from the Chiefs’ perspective. One that I think fans will focus on is Chris Jones, but I want to finish with him (because there are concerns there, though I don’t know that this play is emblematic of what those are). And yes, there was a blown coverage on the back end that’s maddening, and we’ve seen a few too many of those recently. But that’s separate from the pass rush issue I’m addressing here. So let’s talk about the rest of it, because I think it’s representative of a huge part of the problem with the pass rush right now.
This is technically a 3-man rush, with Bolton more serving as a spy after threatening to blitz in order to take up block. However, part of the problem the Chiefs have in their pass rush is well summarized here.
With 2 blockers dedicated to Jones and one dedicated to Bolton, there are two different defensive linemen (Tillery and Karlaftis) who are 1x1 on islands with space. Neither of them wins (Tillery gets a little push but not nearly enough to affect the pocket, and Karlaftis has a tough rep), and Allen is then granted all the time in the world to stare down the field.
This is a good representation of a huge problem with the Chiefs’ pass rush, one that has existed for years. In terms of quick wins, it’s generally Jones or nothing. Karlaftis has developed as a player and is valuable (and is winning 1x1 more often this year, which is good to see), but he’s not a guy who wins often enough to be a “primary” pass rusher, especially against better tackles. Charles Omenihu has taken a step back overall this year, Mike Danna isn’t a 1x1 winner, neither is Tillery, Gillotte (who has improved) is a rookie.
In short, teams can repeatedly send tons of extra attention at Jones and know that if they stop him, they can sit and survey. Spags has built pass rush plans around this tendency, but it’s still a problem. And now teams like the Bills (well-coached and familiar with KC) have shown the ability to often (not always, but often) pick up Spags’ blitzes, and the result is a QB with far too much time.
And then there’s Jones, whose effort on this play is pretty noticeable. Now to be clear, any time you have a contain-based pass rush plan there’s going to be some moments that look rough. But Jones basically ceases to rush entirely on this play. Could he have beaten that double while maintaining integrity? Almost certainly not. But the lack of effort is rough and a bad look.
That said, that’s not the Chris Jones problem I think is most affecting the pass rush. What’s more concerning to me is that Jones isn’t winning as consistently as he was last year (or in all previous years).
And THAT is a potentially massive problem.