The Slow, Boring Erosion of the Kansas City Chiefs Dynasty

Patrick Mahomes is on pace to rush for 1,045 yards this season. If that were Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, or Jalen Hurts, you might say, “Hey, that’s pretty cool! Good for him!” Because it’s the league’s best and most decorated passer, though, it’s actually kind of messed up. Sure, Mahomes is a mobile quarterback—and perhaps the league’s most dangerous third-down scrambler—but he’s not meant to be producing like a high-end RB2 in fantasy football. He’s not built for this. Not over the course of a full season.

Plus, if you’ve watched either of the Kansas City Chiefs’ two nationally televised games so far this season—losses to the Chargers and Eagles—you know that Mahomes isn’t running more often because he wants to; he’s doing so because the Chiefs offense desperately needs it. If you exclude scrambles, Kansas City ranks 26th in the NFL in EPA and 30th in success rate. (Even with those runs included, the Chiefs are merely mediocre—20th in EPA and 27th in success rate.) Mahomes’s 49-yard bomb to Tyquan Thornton at the end of the loss to the Eagles last week marked the first time the Chiefs found the end zone on a drive that didn’t include at least one Mahomes scramble. (Two of their four touchdowns have been on scrambles.) It’s really the only thing this offense has going for it, which is the primary reason the team is 0-2 for the first time in nearly a decade.

I won’t make the mistake of writing off the Chiefs so soon. I won’t do that until they’re mathematically eliminated from the playoff race. A screenshot of this article is not ending up in a “Nobody Believed in Us” montage after they win another Super Bowl in February. But we can’t ignore the obvious: The offense, which had already been sputtering over the past two seasons, has broken down, and Mahomes has been left to push it down the field with little help. If Kansas City is going to turn things around in time for another championship run, that will obviously have to change—and in a hurry. The Chiefs play the 0-2 Giants on Sunday night, but over the following six games, they’ll see the Ravens, Lions, Commanders, and Bills, teams that combined to win 52 games last season. If their performances in those contests mirror what we’ve seen over the first two weeks of the season, they could get swept by that group. Since 1990, only 12 percent of teams that started 0-2 have made the playoffs, according to NFL.com. Only half of that 12 percent won their division, and just three of them went on to win the Super Bowl. I’d imagine that the numbers for teams that start 3-5 or 2-6 are even worse. If going down by 34-0 in the Super Bowl didn’t mark the end of the Chiefs dynasty, missing the playoffs this season will.

While this dumpster fire of an offense is the primary point of concern for the Chiefs right now, their defensive performance has also been troubling. Kansas City’s defense ranks in the bottom 10 in just about every relevant metric, including points allowed per drive, EPA, and success rate. The lack of a pass rush outside of what’s provided by Chris Jones, the load-bearing All-Pro defensive tackle who’s in his age-31 season, has been the root cause of their defensive problems, but the coverage unit isn’t helping matters. After watching Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert calmly pick apart the secondary from clean pockets in Week 1, defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo cranked the blitz dial all the way up against the Eagles, sending extra pass rushers on 56 percent of Jalen Hurts’s dropbacks. The game plan reeked of desperation from the play caller, who didn’t trust his four-man rush to get after the passer quickly enough or his secondary to hold up in coverage. That strategy worked against the Philadelphia passing game, which is going through some shit early in the season, but it’s not a sustainable approach. It's also not sustainable for Mahomes to account for 56.2 percent of the team’s rushing yards

The Chiefs’ main issue is a lack of high-end talent on both sides of the ball. They’ve had the best quarterback in the world for the past few seasons, which has helped paper over holes on the roster, but Mahomes is no longer producing like the NFL’s best quarterback—which isn’t his fault so much as it is head coach Andy Reid’s and general manager Brett Veach’s. Those two worked hand in hand to build the roster, and they were rightly celebrated for their role in the rise of Kansas City’s dynasty. But if the first two weeks of this season are any indication of how things will play out, they’ll also be responsible for its decline.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we dive into how the roster got to its current state: Mahomes’s contract has not been much of a prohibitive factor. If anything, Kansas City’s got a pretty sweet deal compared with the other teams with top quarterbacks. The 10-year, $450 million contract Mahomes signed in 2020 has already been topped by more than a dozen quarterbacks, based on average annual value. And the length of the deal has provided the Chiefs front office with plenty of room to move money around via restructuring. This past offseason, the team freed up nearly $40 million in cap space by converting Mahomes’s base salary into a bonus, which prorates over the rest of the contract, up to five years. And guess what? Kansas City will be able to do that again next offseason, and the offseason after that. Thanks to the restructures, Mahomes hasn’t had a cap hit over $38 million in any season since he signed the contract.

A lack of cap space hasn’t been the cause of the on-field talent drain. As Veach said in 2019, “The cap keeps going up, guys can get moved, traded—it’s never like it seems.” Kansas City has been able to take big swings, both acquiring talent and trading it away for draft capital. In 2019, the Chiefs traded first- and second-round picks to Seattle for pass rusher Frank Clark, who played four up-and-down seasons for the team. In 2021, they traded a first-round pick for left tackle Orlando Brown Jr., who left for Cincinnati after two productive but ultimately disappointing seasons. Veach’s most significant move was dealing Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins in 2022 for five draft picks. He flipped all of those in draft-day trades, and here’s the final return:

Chiefs got:

Cornerback Trent McDuffie

Wide receiver Skyy Moore

Wide receiver Rashee Rice

Guard Hunter Nourzad

Tackle Darian Kinnard

Traded away:

Tyreek Hill

Second-round pick

Third-round pick

Seventh-round pick

McDuffie is a very good player, if not an elite one. Rice has shown flashes of being a good receiver, but he hasn’t been on the field enough to really prove that because he’s been injured and suspended. Moore was traded away in an ick swap after three underwhelming seasons. Nourzad has played 31 snaps, mostly on special teams, and Kinnard never played a snap for the team. Even if the process behind the trade was sound, it hasn’t worked out the way the Chiefs would have hoped.

Other notable Veach trades since include sending cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Titans for a 2025 third-round pick that turned into edge rusher Ashton Gillotte, who’s played 37 snaps through two weeks. He also traded guard Joe Thuney to the Bears for a fourth-round pick in next year’s draft. It’s still too early to judge either of those moves, but the Chiefs would be a better team right now if they hadn’t made them.

Veach, to his credit, has also made some inspired signings and draft picks that helped Kansas City win three Super Bowls in five years. He signed wide receiver Sammy Watkins in his first offseason as GM in 2018, splurged on safety Tyrann Mathieu in 2019, replaced him with Justin Reid in 2022, and added Thuney to the offensive line in 2021. Center Creed Humphrey, guard Trey Smith, linebacker Nick Bolton, and defensive end George Karlaftis have all also earned big second contracts after being Day 2 picks.

Here’s the issue: All of those free agents I mentioned are no longer on the roster, and of the team’s homegrown talent, only Humphrey and, arguably, Smith are stars at their respective positions. Even with all of Veach’s moves, Humphrey is the only proven blue-chip talent he’s added to the team since taking over seven years ago, and Humphrey doesn’t play a premium position

There have been no moves in recent years that have helped the team evolve, and that’s been especially glaring on the offensive side. I’ve been primarily using Veach’s name when discussing these roster moves, but Reid is also heavily involved—and the offense, which has grown stale, is all his. I’d still consider the Chiefs head coach one of the league’s best game planners, but his overarching philosophy is outdated and has the unit lagging behind other top competitors. Those offenses—particularly those in Detroit, Green Bay, Buffalo, and Baltimore—are increasingly turning to more under-center formations and old-school power runs. The Chiefs, meanwhile, still primarily operate out of the gun, using a heavy mix of run-pass options and other spread-style run concepts. At the beginning of the Mahomes era, that was considered innovative, and NFL defensive coordinators couldn’t catch up for a few years. But they eventually did, by ditching more attacking defensive fronts for a read-and-react style of play in the run box. Now, Kansas City’s RPOs aren’t popping for big plays like they used to, and with linebackers playing a more patient game instead of attacking downhill against the run, the downfield passing windows aren’t as open as they once were. The Chiefs offense was known for that downfield passing during its heyday, but they also had an efficient run game to go along with it. Over the past two seasons, they’ve had neither.

The scheme could use some tweaks, but it would work a whole lot more effectively with better talent now that Kelce is declining and is no longer capable of making up for a mediocre receiver room. But even those Super Bowl–winning offenses in the 2021 and 2022 seasons weren’t as dominant as the units that preceded them. Watch a random section of this 2019 Chiefs highlight video. A couple of things will immediately jump out.

2019 Kansas City Chiefs regular season Highlights - AFC WEST CHAMPIONS

God, they used to be so damn fun to watch. And Kelce used to be so fast. But you’ll also notice that Mahomes was slinging the ball downfield with no hesitation, and he was throwing to a receiving corps that had a little more size to it. It sounds dumb since they won two Super Bowls after letting him go, but I’m not sure that the Chiefs have ever replaced Watkins with another receiver who could reliably win on vertical routes outside the numbers. We all remember Hill’s big catch on “Wasp” in this group’s first Super Bowl win, but Watkins cooked Richard Sherman for a 28-yard gain on the key play of the game-winning drive. Kansas City hasn’t had a guy who can consistently do that since.

It’s tried to find solutions—sort of—such as bringing in veteran DeAndre Hopkins before the trade deadline last season and drafting several sub-6-foot speedsters like Moore and, most recently, Xavier Worthy. But Hopkins, in his age-32 season, lacked the necessary speed for the role, and those other receivers lacked the necessary size. If Reid and Veach thought that the scheme and a bit more speed at receiver were enough to make up for the loss of Hill and Watkins—and now the decline of Kelce—they were mistaken. The personnel isn’t what it used to be, and the scheme is no longer as effective.

In all fairness, this has been an awfully negative account of how the past few years have gone for the Chiefs. They’ve obviously done a lot of winning in between all of these roster moves. But there’s also been an unmistakable decline in roster talent and performance over the past two years, to the point that Mahomes can no longer prop the team up. And the burden of trying to do so is weighing on his game. His air ball on the deep shot to Thornton late in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s loss wasn’t an isolated incident. Mahomes has been off target on 22 percent of his throws this season, per TruMedia. That’s the worst mark in the league. To put that in perspective, Anthony Richardson was last in the NFL in 2024 with an 18 percent off-target rate. Mahomes has been less accurate than a guy who got benched for Joe Flacco and Daniel Jones in the last calendar year.

Mahomes has made up for the dip in passing efficiency with his increased scramble rate, and based on the eye test, it’s still pretty clear that he’s the best thing the offense has going for it. We also shouldn’t ignore that the Chiefs have been feeding Thornton, a Patriots castoff, crunch-time targets. The quarterback is still working with a subpar group of pass catchers, which has made his job more difficult. Getting Rice back in four weeks could change that. He showed promise as Kansas City’s lead receiver last season before he tore his ACL in Week 4, but he had an average depth of target of just 5.2 yards. He’ll be another reliable option underneath next to Kelce. But the deep passing game will still rely on Worthy, who continues to recover from his Week 1 shoulder injury, and Marquise Brown. We saw how that worked out last season.

Even if the offense manages to turn things around and Mahomes gets back to playing good football, it’s unlikely that the Chiefs will achieve their offseason goal of getting the deep passing game back to where it was at the beginning of the decade. “Coach Reid has challenged me this offseason to push the ball down the field, let guys have chances to make plays,” Mahomes said in June. “And then once we get that back to where we want to be in our standard that we believe we should have, then we can come back to the underneath stuff.” Mahomes and Reid were saying similar things about the offense the previous offseason. This is a problem that has been festering and one that the team’s brain trust sees as the main hurdle between the current version of the team and what it used to be. The clearest indicator that this team is in decline isn’t the 0-2 start or its declining production. It’s the fact that Reid and Veach have been unable to solve this problem after spending the past few years trying to do so.

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