Kansas City Chiefs: Numbers don’t add up to Super Bowl 53 win
It’s been an amazing year for the AFC’s No. 1 seed in 2018. But history says that Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs won’t win Super Bowl LIII.
With a 35-3 victory over the Oakland Raiders in Week 17, the Kansas City Chiefs locked up the top seed in the AFC playoffs for the first time since 1997.
Led by NFL MVP candidate Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid’s team scored an NFL-best 565 points. It’s the third-highest single season in league annals, topped only by the 2013 Denver Broncos (606) and 2007 New England Patriots (589). Those teams were led by quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, respectively.
The former threw an NFL record 55 touchdown passes that season, breaking the previous record of 50 set by Brady in 2007.
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Of course, it’s been well documented what happened to both of those players. Manning and Brady earned league MVP honors in their respective seasons. But neither quarterback and their teams walked away with the real hardware: a Lombardi Trophy. In both instances, the player and the club made it to Super Sunday but neither was crowned a champion.
Stop for one second. In the best Richard Nixon voice, let’s make something perfectly clear. This is not intended to forecast doom for the AFC West champions. The fact remains that scoring a bunch of points and relying on the passing game has not been kind to those in the past.
Nine teams in NFL history have scored 540-plus points in a season and all failed to win it all. There’s only one example of a player throwing at least 40 touchdown passes in a season and he and his team capturing a Super Bowl title (Rams’ quarterback Kurt Warner in 1999).
But there’s something else to keep in mind here. As previously mentioned, the Chiefs scored the third-most points in a season in NFL history. The squad’s 71 total touchdowns is also the third-best total in league annals. However, Reid’s club also surrendered 421 points — a brisk 26.3 average. The most points allowed in a season by an eventual Super Bowl champion is 400 (25.0 per game), this by the 2011 New York Giants.
The Kansas City Chiefs are a scoring machine. In four losses this season, Andy Reid’s club totaled an impressive 150 points. There have been few obstacles for this club along the way. And it will be playing at raucous Arrowhead Stadium as long as it remains in the playoffs.
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Perhaps this is the year that all of those past trends bite the dust. Perhaps offense will prevail when it comes to winning Super Bowl LIII at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. For now, it would be wise to take a wait-and-see attitude. Because history does have this somewhat-annoying habit of repeating itself fairly often.