From the start of the 2023 season through last January’s AFC championship game, the Kansas City Chiefs were especially elite in one particular area: winning one-score games.
In that period, the Chiefs won 17 straight games that were decided by one score. During last year’s regular season alone, Kansas City was 11-0 in games decided by eight points or less — often not pulling out a win until the final minute of the fourth quarter.
It was the Chiefs’ usual brilliance in tight moments that made Monday’s 31-28 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars extra painful. Kansas City fell to 2-3 with the defeat, and in a complete reversal from its previous dominance, fell to 0-3 this season in one-score games.
“We have the guys and we’ve executed at certain points in games and looked really good, but we crush ourselves with penalties and mistakes,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said postgame. “We’ve done that to ourselves all season long.”
He added: “We’ve got to be better. We’ve lost too many games already.”
Mahomes has often been the reason the Chiefs have been so difficult to beat in clutch moments, engineering seven game-winning drives last season alone. On Monday, while Mahomes did lead game-tying and go-ahead drives in the fourth quarter, he also made one of the night’s most critical errors: A pick-six from inside the five-yard line that gave the Jaguars a 21-14 lead late in the third quarter.
“It was a great call by them defensively, and obviously a great play by him getting the pick,” Mahomes said. “I’ve got to find a way to tackle him or slow him down after the interception.”
The errors did not belong to the quarterback alone.
As a team, Kansas City committed a whopping 13 penalties for 109 yards compared to only four flags for Jacksonville.
The defense also had some high-profile foibles.
In the second quarter, three Chiefs players let an errant Trevor Lawrence pass go through their hands on the same play, a throw that should have been an interception.
And on the game’s decisive play in the final minute of the fourth, Lawrence fell down twice in the backfield, but somehow was able to regain his footing and scramble for a touchdown despite several Kansas City defenders in the area. (A score that was set up by a pass interference penalty on 3rd-and-13 one snap before.)
“We’ve got to finish that play,” Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones said of the Lawrence run. “It was a fluke play for him to be able to break that many tackles. I put it on us as a defense. We’ve got to finish. We’ve got to bring him down right there.”
Kansas City’s current winless streak in one-score games provides some evidence for those who felt the team’s 15-2 record last season did not accurately reflect how beatable the Chiefs really were. In 2024, Kansas City had a plus-59 point differential, 11th-best in the NFL despite being tied with the Detroit Lions for most wins.
This year, the Chiefs are getting a taste of their own medicine. Kansas City is 12th with a plus-18 point differential, which is better than four teams who each have only one loss so far this season. (The Chiefs’ three losses have come by a combined total of only 12 points.)
Ultimately, much like how its two-season streak of winning every one-score game felt unsustainable, it’s more likely than not Kansas City will eventually even things out and start being on the right side of tight games again. Monday was at least another step forward for the offense, which has now scored 65 points in the last two games compared to only 63 in the first three.
Another reason why the mistakes and penalties felt so backbreaking against the Jaguars is that the Chiefs largely dominated the action. They gained more first downs, accrued more total yards, averaged more yards per play and committed fewer turnovers than Jacksonville.
“As much as these losses hurt, and the wins, there’s always good and bad in each,” head coach Andy Reid said. “Things you can learn from and move forward with. We’ve got to make sure we do that, but we’ve got to be more disciplined with the penalty part of it, and then I’ve got to obviously evaluate those and go from there.”
