The Chiefs are not normal. They should not be thought about as normal. Or analyzed as normal. They should not be discussed as normal. They are very, very, very un-normal.
In a very, very, very good way.
Normal teams play their opponents. The Chiefs have been normal for a long time. The Chiefs have spent many, many years playing their opponents. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost. The losses tend to stick out.
These Chiefs play themselves. Their standard is to first beat the team across from them, sure, but more than that they are aware of a level the team across from them does not possess. That is the Chiefs’ highest standard.
“I know what we’re capable of,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said.
Football does not allow perfection, but realistically, considering the opponent and the moment this 34-20 win over the Baltimore Ravens Monday night is as well as this group has played in the regular season.
“We brought our energy,” receiver Sammy Watkins said.
The Ravens are a very good team. They will be mocked a bit now, their recent postseason failures highlighted. That’s the way it goes in the NFL. But this group still went 14-2 last year, and still looked like the league’s best team through two weeks.
So we mean no disrespect here: If the Chiefs play their best, they’re not merely better than anyone else in the NFL, but rather are so much better that the only suspense is which hilarious highlight will go the viral-est.
At the moment, you can choose between the time Patrick Mahomes threw an underhanded screen pass to his fullback or the time he threw a touchdown pass to his left tackle.
Because these are the Chiefs, they even had a good story for each play. The Chiefs ran the Sherman play against the Patriots two years ago, but the option was accidentally covered by a defender, the full capabilities of the design hidden in plain sight. Reid waited the last two years for the right moment to bring it back.
The tackle-eligible play to Eric Fisher was one of these training camp installs, when Reid comes to work after a summer at his California beach house, the notebook he takes everywhere with him, the paddle board filled with wild ideas.
The Chiefs ran this one a handful of times, and Fisher was always so open that Mahomes got bored, so he decided to test his left tackle with a high one during practice one day. Fisher passed the test, and good thing, because the pass Monday night made him jump, too.
“I’m sure he’ll be talking about it for years to come,” Mahomes said. “So I’m glad he got into the end zone.”
Again: This is not normal. Chiefs fans old enough to be potty-trained are the last people who need to be reminded of that. They know. They can see it.
The Chiefs used to celebrate every win like it was their last because, often, it was. Now they talk about the Chargers win last week like they disrespected a family member.
“We just wanted to prove to ourselves,” defensive end Frank Clark said. “We’ve got so much more. I felt like we let ourselves down. We just wanted to come out and just get that nasty taste out of our mouth.”
Pardon the repetition here, but Clark “felt like we let ourselves down” in winning an NFL game. He wanted to get “that nasty taste out of our mouth” from beating a division opponent. On the road.
This is next-level stuff. This is a team that is talented but still ambitious. Accomplished but starved for more. They are faster than opponents by design, and now often tougher by training.
A year ago, this group found something in themselves. They had come so close to the Super Bowl the year before — we don’t need to go over that again — and an obvious feeling had developed that they could be next.
The defense went total makeover. They kept Chris Jones and walked away from most of the rest. The progress came in unsteady bursts for most of that season. The breakthrough came, of all the places in the world, in Mexico City.
The defense won that game and allowed just 11.5 points the rest of the regular season. In the playoffs — in no small part from the healing provided by a first-round bye — the offense took over. This is what good teams do.
We are just three games into this season. It will be a wild ride. But there have been questions about this group’s energy, about whether it’s possible for a Super Bowl champion to remain largely intact and retain the same hunger as the first time around.
The most logical counter to that was always in this group’s specific personalities and worldview. This isn’t an aging group holding on for one more round. This is a young group, with some of the sport’s best players, each with the unspoken understanding that winning just one Super Bowl would mean living the rest of their days with regret.
Except, well, Clark wasn’t making up a story to tell himself. The defense really wasn’t that good against the Chargers, especially against the run, which is a bad way to go into a game against the Ravens. The offense had even more reason to be disappointed.
They won the game, yes, but here’s the whole point: A complacent group would’ve been satisfied with that. This group cussed themselves out and played worlds better against a worlds better opponent.
Sometimes we do this thing in sports where we talk about measuring sticks: this team is a measuring stick for that team. That line of thinking has its place, and a prime-time game featuring the league’s consensus best teams and the two most recent MVPs was too much to resist.
But, as it turns out, the Ravens aren’t the Chiefs’ measuring stick. The Chiefs are their own measuring stick. Their standard is their own, and it’s one that only they understand.
The big moments are stacking up, though, giving the rest of us a better idea all the time about what this group is capable of accomplishing together.
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