‘Want to win it every year’: How Chiefs have avoided NFL gravity… and could surpass Pats dynasty

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The NFL is widely regarded as having incredible parity, and that’s true to an extent – teams often go from worst-to-first, turning from cellar dweller to title contender in an instant, and then falling back off the cliff.

Weirdly, it doesn’t have much to do with the salary cap, which is one of the strictest in pro US sports. While there is a tight band in which teams must operate – unlike say Major League Baseball, where the current champion LA Dodgers are just buying up everyone who’s any good – money isn’t the key reason things get weird every year.

It’s because the season is short. You can have a hell of a lot of variance in just 17 games, particularly if you get a bad injury to a superstar player, and one great draft can have a major impact – see the Washington Commanders going from the No.2 pick to the NFC title game.

At some point, you’re supposed to struggle just because things will go wrong. Just this year, the Cowboys and 49ers fell off from the equal-best records in the NFC to having losing seasons.

This should’ve been that year for the Chiefs, really. They lost key cogs at key positions like Rashee Rice, Hollywood Brown and Isiah Pacheco for large periods, while they cycled through offensive linemen looking for answers before cheaply filling holes across the offence mid-season.

Even with all those issues, and with a heaping helping of continued good fortune by winning all their close games, they posted a 15-2 record and made it back to the title game. They just keep rejecting the NFL’s natural gravity.

Ahead of Super Bowl LIX between the Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, here’s a look at how they’ve done it.

MAHOMES SWEET MAHOMES

Clearly, having one of the best quarterbacks in the league is a blessing.

But Mahomes’ numbers were down in 2024, and just in his own conference Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Joe Burrow probably had better seasons.

He is still a magician, and in a playoff game his aura has to mean something. While that Super Bowl against the Bucs where he spent every play running for his life showed he can’t do it all alone, you can basically never count him out.

And the key to success in the NFL is still having a great quarterback. It’s why the Cleveland Browns are never good, and why the Detroit Lions are good for the first time in decades now, and why the Green Bay Packers have been there-or-thereabouts since they added Brett Favre – if you can trust your signal-caller, your floor is just so much higher.

Not having a franchise QB can have a compounding effect on the rest of your roster, too. If you have to overpay for an average player, you’re losing money you can spend elsewhere; and even if you’ve got someone you know is good enough to lead you to the playoffs, you can still overpay.

You’ve got teams like the Dallas Cowboys, who can’t negotiate their way out of a wet paper bag, and are stuck with Dak Prescott on the largest annual salary for a contract in the NFL – Dak is pretty good, but he’s not an absolute top-tier starter.

And you’ve got teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars, who it seemed like were doing the right thing with Trevor Lawrence, who at his best has looked like a franchise QB… but he hasn’t done it consistently, and he’s on $US55 million a year, equal with Joe Burrow and Jordan Love as the second-biggest deals. And the rest of the Jaguars, from the porous roster to the questionable front office, stink so it doesn’t even matter if Lawrence is awesome.

So not only does Kansas City have Mahomes, who’s arguably the NFL’s No.1 asset even if he’s not the NFL’s No.1 player, but they have him on a deal that has become more and more reasonable over time.

It sounded enormous before the 2020 season when he signed a $US450 million, 10-year extension but that average annual value of $US45 million has been surpassed a bunch of times by now.

A full 11 players have a larger AAV than Mahomes, from the awful Deshaun Watson, to the questionable Tua Tagovailoa and Kyler Murray, to franchise guys who don’t have Mahomes’ track record (well duh, nobody does) and took advantage of natural contract inflation like Jackson, Burrow and Justin Herbert.

Even Mahomes’ Super Bowl opponent, Jalen Hurts, gets paid $US6 million a year more than him. It’s on a shorter deal, so it’s not necessarily comparable (the risk of Mahomes falling off, as much as it exists, is baked into the size of his contract) but it’s still remarkable given Hurts has often been a liability in the passing game. Which is a pretty big part of a QB’s job description!

Even at the time Mahomes could have asked for more money, and especially by taking a shorter deal. If he had signed a five-year deal at the time he put pen to paper last time, the AAV would have surely been higher, and he would’ve been on the market next year.

While he probably would’ve stayed with the Chiefs, the offers to leave would have been enormous, and either way the deal would’ve been market-setting. Mahomes would easily smash Prescott’s $US60 million AAV record; instead, that’s at least $US15 million the Chiefs can spend elsewhere, almost 6 per cent of the salary cap.

He consciously took a life-changing amount of money that didn’t restrict his team’s options going forward.

“The philosophy was ‘Win every year’ and we’ve done a good job of that. … They’re going to do what they feel like is the value of the guy they’re trying to get,” Mahomes has said.

“They’re going to try and maybe overspend a little bit, but they’re not going to go crazy to where you’re going to be hurting (future seasons). I want to be able to win it every year I’m here.’’

FIXING THEIR BIGGEST FLAW

The last two times the Chiefs didn’t win the title, the 2020 loss to Tom Brady’s Bucs where Mahomes was running for his life, and the 2021 AFC title game loss to the Bengals, forced changes.

They could no longer just be an offensive juggernaut that outscored everyone. They needed more than one gameplan.

Trading away Tyreek Hill, and using the haul of draft picks to replenish the defence, was risky but nailed perfectly by general manager Brett Veach.

It may end up being one of the best drafts in recent memory, even while wasting a second-round pick on receiver Skyy Moore – adding gun cornerback Trent McDuffie, fellow defensive backs Bryan Cook, Jaylen Watson, Nazeeh Johnson and Josh Williams, team sack-leading edge George Karlaftis, star running back Isiah Pacheco, and key linebacker Leo Chenal, who was arguably MVP in last year’s Super Bowl after forcing a fumble and blocking an extra point.

Throw in undrafted guard Mike Caliendo, who has played more than expected this season, and it was a game-changing group added on the cheap.

“That was a big draft for us,” Veach told NFL.com.

“I mean, that was coming off the heels of a Tyreek Hill trade. You know, you had to have impact players, and it just worked out that they were more so on the defensive side, but all those guys in that draft class have turned out to be, you know, really good players and certainly a big reason why we’re here.”

Adding all of that young talent, particularly so many cornerbacks late in the draft, allowed the Chiefs to gamble on not paying L’Jarius Sneed a new contract.

Instead Sneed was traded to Tennessee, where he underwhelmed, while McDuffie moved from the slot to the outside and performed even better. Opponents could pick on the opposite corner until seventh-round pick Watson, who missed the last 11 games of the regular season through injury, returned in time for the playoffs.

“Trent’s as good as there is in the NFL,” Veach explained.

“On one end, the Sneed trade was more of something we had to do just because we have a lot of highest-paid players at their position on our team. (The trade) wasn’t something that we really wanted to do. It certainly gave us comfort that we had Trent and we had some young guys that we believed in.

“We’ll continue to add talent as we go here, but Trent McDuffie, he’s one of the best in the game, so it makes those tough decisions — even though they’re decisions you have to make for the betterment of the team in the long run — you at least feel like you got a shot because you have Trent McDuffie.”

THE RIGHT COACHES

Of course talent means little without a good scheme, and the Chiefs also have the benefit of arguably the best defensive coordinator of all-time, Steve Spagnuolo.

Some coaches just aren’t cut out to lead the whole team, and ‘Spags’ is a perfect example. His stint in charge of the then-St Louis Rams was awful, and he had a few bad years afterwards leading the Saints and Giants defences.

But since joining the Chiefs the 65-year-old, who spearheaded the Giants’ upset win over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII (the helmet catch game that ended New England’s unbeaten season), has gone from strength to strength and his players have long lauded his impact.

The aggressive call to blitz Josh Allen on fourth and five late in the AFC title game, forcing a wild throw which Dalton Kincaid could not catch, only added to Spagnuolo’s resume.

“(That play) is part of why he’s the greatest defensive coordinator ever,” Karlaftis told The Kansas City Star after that game.

“He knows what to call, when to call it.”

McDuffie added: “Spags, I’m telling you, is one of one.”

Then there’s Andy Reid.

While he is still unlikely to catch Bill Belichick’s total of six Super Bowls, the Chiefs mentor is only 55 wins behind Don Shula’s all-time NFL coaching record.

At the Chiefs’ current pace, he could get there within half a decade – perhaps mirroring Mahomes’ contract through to 2031 – though the 66-year-old would only confirm this week he’ll be back for at least one more season.

“That’s not part of it,” Reid said about the winningest coach record.

“I just enjoy teaching. I don’t get caught up much in the stats or the records. I enjoy being around the guys. I enjoy football, the game. You can’t put in the hours we do and not enjoy it. I love the game.”

It’s only fitting Reid is again facing the Eagles in a Super Bowl, because the first half of his career came in Philadelphia, where the success-starved city bizarrely seemed to turn against their winningest ever coach (130 wins from 1999-2012).

While Reid never won a Super Bowl there, he took the Eagles to four straight NFC title games and eventually their first Super Bowl in 24 years in 2004, with Donovan McNabb’s side narrowly falling to the Patriots 24-21.

Yet his stint was not overly appreciated, and in the end, he was sacked after the 2012 season – when he had produced just his third losing record in 14 campaigns.

Immediately picked up by the Chiefs, and immediately taking them to a 9-0 start and then the playoffs, his Kansas City sides were strong but not dominant until the ascension of Mahomes.

Beating San Francisco in Super Bowl LIV allowed Reid to avoid a continued status as one of the NFL’s best ever coaches without a Lombardi Trophy. Instead, he’s now in the conversation for the NFL’s best ever coach, period.

An offensive innovator, Reid banked two of his Super Bowls very directly through brilliant playcalls – first the “Corn Dog” call that helped the Chiefs beat the Eagles two years ago, then its cousin the “Tom and Jerry” play which allowed Mecole Hardman to catch the game-winner in overtime.

While there is understandably a growing level of Chiefs fatigue, particularly when they’re beating very likeable teams like Buffalo to make yet another Super Bowl, their brilliance cannot be ignored.

For years they weren’t exactly a joke of a franchise – Homer Simpson was more upset when he became owner of their divisional rivals the Denver Broncos – but they had done very little for decades, after playing in the first Super Bowl in 1966, and winning the fourth.

Between 1994 and 2014, they did not win a single playoff game. In the 10 years since, they have won 18 of them, including their last nine.

While assisted by the expansion of the playoffs, that’s more than the Brady-Belichick Patriots ever won in a decade. That’s the level they have not just reached, but surpassed.

They will be not be greater than the New England dynasty until they come close to its longevity, but for the intensity of dominance, it is hard to surpass what Kansas City has done.