the chiefs just don't have it this year

I've long held that the Super Bowl Loss Hangover is one of the most devastating and consistent forces in the NFL. 

It's a fact that the worst finish for the Chiefs in the Mahomes era to this point (stops to crunch some numbers...wait this can't be true...hold on)

You're telling me that Mahomes has been a starter for 7 seasons and has gone to 5 Super Bowls, meanwhile Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen have gone to 0? But the media tells me these are rivals? 

And the two that Mahomes didn't go to were overtime losses in the AFC Championship at home. Huh. Weird. 

Anyways, one of those AFC Championship losses was Mahomes first year as a starter, pre-Spagnuolo. The other was the Super Bowl Loss Hangover year. 

Given that the Chiefs lost the Super Bowl last year, it was to be expected that they would have a down year. 

The tricky, annoying thing is that throughout most of the year, the eye test has showed they're playing pretty well, better than last year, which again was a Super Bowl year. Here's the point differential of the top 20 or so:

The top teams by point differntial are all the strong teams, of course. The 9-3 Seahawks and 9-3 Rams are the teams you do not want to face in the playoffs.

And the #1 seed in the NFC, the Chicago Bears, has gotta be here somewhere, scrolling, scrolling, they're 16th in a league of 32 teams? So the Bears have the point differential of 6-win teams and the Chiefs and Lions havd the pd of 8-win teams. The Broncos have 10 wins and are two behind the Chiefs in pd standings.

I'm not knocking winning close. It's a skill. Last year the Chiefs had a knack for winning close games and rode that to the Super Bowl, so it works.

So that's what I mean by annoying, is that the Chiefs haven't actually fallen off and had a hellish season like the Giants or a mediocre season like the Steelers/Ravens. They've just come up short too many times. They just don't have it. 

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There's also this:

Starting in Week 4, the Chiefs have won every home game and lost every road game.

Not sure if they've switched team planes or what, but cannot win on the road.

Here's their remaining games:

Road games against Titans and Raiders.

So maybe they can go 4-1 or 5-0 and make the playoffs yet. 

But also, they're going to be going on the road in January. So this trend of not performing well on the road confirms my priors--the Chiefs just don't have it this year. 

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Everything I'm about to say in the next section, makes it look like I'm saying watch out for the Chiefs. And that's only like 2% true. There's a bigger point I'm going to attempt to make.

Let's go back to the 2019 season. 

Tom Brady's Patriots were 10-1 at Thanksgiving.

Lamar Jackson's Ravens were 14-2 at the end of the year.

The Chiefs were 7-4. Mahomes had missed two games due to a knee injury. He came back at the Chiefs still lost to the Titans.

We think that December means we know who's good and who's not. But there's still a lot of games left to be played.