KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. He also covers the Chiefs as our game-day digital reporter. Share your story idea with Tod.
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Even with Sunday’s overtime win against the Indianapolis Colts, the Kansas City Chiefs sit 10th in the AFC playoff picture, so it remains an uphill climb — but not an impossible one.
The nine-time reigning AFC West champion Chiefs are well off the pace in the division, sitting three games behind a Denver Broncos team that already beat them once this season.
Kansas City (6-5) also has lost to each of the three teams currently occupying a Wild Card spot — the Los Angeles Chargers, Jacksonville and Buffalo, who are all 7-4 on the season — while Pittsburgh and Houston, who also are 6-5, have better conference records at the moment.
But that underscores the importance of rallying from an 11-point deficit in the fourth quarter Sunday to beat Indianapolis in overtime.
“This is exactly what we needed,” Patrick Mahomes said. “To win against a really good football team and the game’s not going your way, you could have folded in that situation, and kind of the rest of the season, but guys responded and found a way to win.”
Star tight end Travis Kelce knows how critical the victory was: “I mean, we were 5-5. We need every win we can get right now.”
Fellow Chiefs star Chris Jones didn’t mince words either.
“It was a must-win,” the veteran defensive end said. “If we lose this game, we go to 5-6, and our playoff chance is at 23% and we have a tough schedule coming up. I think this was a must-win game, and I think we have to take it like that through the end of the season, as a team. These games are important for seeding and also for securing our spot in the playoffs.”
Kansas City is a three-point favorite Thursday in Dallas despite traveling on a short week for a Thanksgiving battle with the Cowboys. The Chiefs almost certainly will be favored in the three after that, too — home games against the Texans and Chargers before a trip to Tennessee.
But the results haven’t often matched the projections this season.
Kansas City went an astounding 12-0 in one-score games last season, including the playoffs, en route to a third straight Super Bowl appearance, but they had been 0-5 until rallying for a 23-20 win against the Colts.
“We’ve been in these games,” Mahomes said. “All five of our losses felt like these games where there’s plays here and there that we didn’t make. We could have won all of them and we didn’t. Until you prove it, you can talk about it all day, but until you prove it’s not going to happen. We had to prove that we can win a game like this.”
Trailing 20-9 in the fourth quarter, a Kareem Hunt fumble ended a promising drive in the red zone as the Chiefs’ chances of winning crashed to 14%, but the defense responded with four consecutive three-and-outs as the offense got untracked and found a way to win.
“The part I liked the best was the support the guys gave each other,” coach Andy Reid said. “I thought that was important. Nobody flinched on it. It wasn’t hanging their head; that wasn’t happening. They came out and they played, and they did it when it counted.”
Even in a relatively dark moment for the offense, Mahomes said the defense and Chiefs Kingdom, urged into full throat by Jones, provided some light.
“Obviously, the energy’s not good, but I thought it was really cool to not only see our defense stand tall in that moment ... then there was like a feeling that you had in Arrowhead,” Mahomes said. “You could see the fans were behind us. They didn’t hang their heads because there was a fumble. They said, ‘We’re going to be there with y’all' — through the end, through this all. I thought that was really cool.”
The road won’t be easy, but Kansas City largely controls its own fate for a postseason berth despite a 3-4 record in AFC play, but only if the Chiefs keep finding ways to win, especially in head-to-head games against the Texans and Chargers.
“Winning in this league is tough, especially when you’re playing those type of caliber teams that you may see in February,” Jones said. “It’s tough. The margin for error is like that.”
Jones held his index finger and thumb an inch apart.
“We got to see the character of our team today,” Jones said. “... For us to pull together as a team, and overcome whatever adversity it was to beat these guys, I think we needed that as a team.”
It proved that Kansas City’s championship DNA remains intact, at least for one afternoon.
“We’re still not where we want to be at,” Mahomes said. "But this was big — getting a win against a really good football team, kind of proving to ourselves that we can play this kind of football game where it’s not always pretty. Now, we’ve just to build off that momentum.”
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