The Chiefs’ reach for immortality, Bills, Eagles (and refs) be damned: Sando’s Pick Six

No one can say the Kansas City Chiefs are taking the easy road to NFL immortality.

With a 32-29 victory over Buffalo on Sunday, the Chiefs have now conquered Josh Allen’s Bills, Lamar Jackson’s Baltimore Ravens and Joe Burrow’s Cincinnati Bengals in consecutive AFC Championship Games.

Arrowhead Stadium is where opponent legacies go to die.

The two-time defending Super Bowl champs can claim (slight) superiority over the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers in the dynastic hierarchy if they can beat the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans on Feb. 9 (more on that to come).

It’s a lot to process.

The Pick Six column for this championship weekend puts into perspective this run of Chiefs excellence while making sense of Kansas City’s propensity for winning close games. The chances for a team as good as the Chiefs to win 17 consecutive one-possession games, as they have now done, is about one-tenth of 1 percent, but here we are, feeling as though these Kansas City close-call victories are automatic.

The full menu:

• Chiefs-Bills from all the angles
• What about the officiating?
• Eagles upset coach-QB paradigm
• About the Cowboys’ coaching hire
• Lions-Jaguars were tracking
• Two-minute drill: HC hiring cycle

1. Move over, 1970s Steelers? Not quite yet, but the Chiefs are almost there.

• Chiefs dynasty update: When the Chiefs won the Super Bowl last season, I set out to determine reasonable criteria for dynastic status.

My criteria: winning three-plus Super Bowls over five-plus seasons; posting the NFL’s best regular-season win rate, beginning with the first Super Bowl-winning season and ending with the final or most recent one; and reaching the conference championship round more than half the time during the dynasty.

Four teams made the cut, led by the 2001-18 New England Patriots. The 1981-94 San Francisco 49ers were next, followed by the 1974-79 Steelers and the 2019-23 Chiefs.

The table below shows how the 2019-24 Chiefs compare to those 1974-79 Steelers now. Kansas City needs a fourth Super Bowl victory to tie those legendary Pittsburgh teams in championships. The Chiefs already have the edge in Super Bowl appearances, percentage of seasons reaching the championship round and regular-season win rate.

The Chiefs opened as 1.5-point favorites over the Eagles. Does anyone dare bet against them?

• Close-game mastery: Those 1974-79 Steelers enjoyed a 10.1-point average point margin during the regular season, much higher than the 6.3 average for Kansas City since 2019.

The Chiefs have taken their close-game high-wire act to ridiculous heights over the past two seasons with an active 17-game winning streak in games decided by eight or fewer points.

To calculate how likely a team would be to win 17 consecutive games of any kind, we take the team’s expected win rate in those games to the power of the streak duration. The Chiefs had a 42-21 record in these games when Patrick Mahomes was in the lineup from 2018 to ’23, so I used a .667 win rate to calculate probability for this Kansas City team. As the table below shows, the chances for a 17-game streak were minuscule.

The Chiefs are unusually well-suited to win these games.

Only the Bills’ Allen has approached Mahomes in scrambling ability on critical downs and in critical situations during close games, as detailed earlier in the season.

Chiefs coach Andy Reid frequently seems to have the perfect call dialed up, as he did when sustaining a second-quarter touchdown drive with a Mahomes run on fourth down, one of several times Mahomes found open space to his right. Reid then clinched the game by scheming Samaje Perine wide open to convert third-and-9.

AND THAT WILL CLINCH IT pic.twitter.com/CByTRi4Epn

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) January 27, 2025

 

Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo would be anyone’s top choice for calling the perfect defense when the stakes are highest. He had answers for the Bills’ quarterback sneaks and hurried Allen into a difficult throw with a fourth-and-5 pressure with the game on the line. Defensive tackle Chris Jones is another X-factor.

“The whole first half is long drives against K.C., and then in the final 10 minutes, Kansas City gets the stops,” a coach from a rival team said. “It is classic with Chris Jones, too. He is a modern-day Randy Moss. He’ll play when he wants to play, and when he wants to play, look out.”

Small advantages in personnel, tactics and execution can seem magnified in games with fewer possessions — Chiefs games, in other words. As the chart below shows, no games have had fewer combined possessions this season than games involving Kansas City (the Bills have had the third-fewest combined possessions in their games, on average).

This season is not an outlier. Whether it’s the Chiefs’ preferred style, or opponents are trying to shorten games against Mahomes, or both, the trend is clear. From 2018 to 2024 (including playoffs), Chiefs games have featured the fewest total drives per game (20.7) of any team, per TruMedia. Of the 50 Super Bowl entrants since 2000, Kansas City owns five of the eight lowest marks in total drives per game, including the lowest this season. Sunday’s game featured just 19 total drives.

With possessions at a premium, the Chiefs’ final three drives against the Bills produced a touchdown to take a 29-22 lead, a field goal to take a 32-29 lead and a drive consuming the final 1:54 to run out the clock. Kansas City’s defense stopped two of Buffalo’s final three drives on downs, including the final one, which started at 3:33 with Buffalo needing a field goal to tie or touchdown to win.

“Buffalo gets it started with a run play and then it’s a bunch of dropbacks,” the opposing coach said. “They did throw a wide receiver screen in there, but it looked like they were under stress right away, like, ‘Oh my God, I need yards,’ instead of playing the way Kansas City plays when they know they have four downs — more of a, ‘Hey, let’s take the checkdown and make it be third-and-3.'”

• Brady-Manning comp: This was the ninth meeting between Allen’s Bills and Mahomes’ Chiefs, which had caught my attention because … the ninth meeting between Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts and Tom Brady’s Patriots represented a breakthrough for Manning, a 38-34 victory in the AFC Championship Game following the 2006 season.

Allen is 4-1 against Mahomes in the regular season but now 0-4 in the playoffs, despite the Bills’ offense giving the Chiefs’ defense more trouble than any other team of late. Six of Kansas City’s 20 worst games by defensive EPA since 2021 (including playoffs) have come against Buffalo. Three of those six games have come in the postseason, with the 12.46 offensive EPA the Bills totaled Sunday marking the Chiefs’ 13th-worst showing over that span.

Manning began his career 0-6 against Brady, including 0-2 in the playoffs, before winning the next three meetings and reaching his first Super Bowl. He finished 6-11 overall in the matchup but 3-2 in the postseason, twice beating Brady in the AFC Championship Game in his twilight years with the Denver Broncos (see table below).

A Super Bowl breakthrough will have to wait for Allen, who keeps stacking productive postseason performances without realizing the ultimate payoff. He’s keeping elite company in the AFC with Burrow and Jackson in that regard, all thanks to the Chiefs.

2. Chatter over the Chiefs getting favorable treatment from officials endured all week and carried into Sunday. Here’s the latest.

Penalty breakdowns flooded social media heading into the AFC Championship Game after two 15-yard fouls for hits on Mahomes helped Kansas City against Houston in the divisional round.

Heading into Sunday, the Chiefs came out on the favorable side of some wide differentials over their previous 11 playoff games, including 8-1 in penalties for defensive holding, 7-1 in penalties for roughing the passer and 4-1 in penalties for unnecessary roughness.

The Chiefs were also on the favorable end of a 20-7 gap in presnap penalties on offense: false starts, illegal formations, illegal shifts, 12 men on the field and delays of game (excluding on fourth down, when teams sometimes incur delay penalties on purpose).

Closer inspection showed the Chiefs gaining first downs or touchdowns on some of those plays regardless of the calls against opponents. Many were clear fouls. Some could have gone either way. A few seemed misguided. The venue could also have played a role, as eight of these 11 games took place at noisy Arrowhead Stadium.

What about Sunday? There were no fouls for hits on quarterbacks, and the 8-6 overall disparity in favor of Kansas City was nothing out of the ordinary.

Two replay situations invited scrutiny. In both cases, calls made in Kansas City’s favor withstood review. Also in both cases, the original calls easily could have gone in the Bills’ favor. They did not.

WHAT A JOB BY WORTHY – Tony Romo pic.twitter.com/5fgXQpzQNv

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) January 27, 2025

 

On the first, shown above, Buffalo challenged officials’ contention that Xavier Worthy caught Mahomes’ desperation heave on third-and-5 in the second quarter. A penalty for defensive holding would have sustained this touchdown drive regardless, but the 26-yard gain to the Buffalo 3 produced a big swing, as officials ruled Worthy had joint possession with Bills safety Cole Bishop, with the tie going to the offensive player. By challenging, Bills coach Sean McDermott hoped for either an interception or an incompletion that would have saved 21 yards.

“It is simultaneous possession, but it boils down to simultaneous control, and it was not that,” a coach versed in the rules said. “The Buffalo defender caught the ball between his two arms, and the Kansas City player only had one. The ball touching the ground becomes immaterial; there was not enough movement for loss of control. I think they took the easy way out by letting it stand.”

The Chiefs’ defense stops them on fourth down!

📺: #BUFvsKC on CBS
📱: Stream on @NFLPlus and Paramount+ pic.twitter.com/VwGmEZ3IrW

— NFL (@NFL) January 27, 2025

This coach sided with officials on the second replay review, which seemed confusing as the down judge and line judge gave conflicting signals as to whether the Bills’ Allen crossed the line to gain on fourth-and-1 from the Kansas City 41-yard line with 13:01 remaining in a game Buffalo led 22-21. The down judge ruled Allen short. He was nearer to the side Allen ran, and his call prevailed. That triggered an automatic review.

“They go by who has the better look, and since the ball was closer to the bottom-of-the-screen hash, the other official deferred to him,” the coach said. “But in this case, you couldn’t see the ball and there were no points of reference to project with precision where the ball would have been.”

The previous play is under review pic.twitter.com/NObGPU7gw8

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) January 27, 2025

That did not stop CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore from opining that Allen had made it by one-third of the football. The ball is about 11.3 inches long. If there’s an angle showing the ball crossing the line to gain by 3.76 inches, then the Bills got robbed. But I didn’t see one.

3. Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts are winning at an elite clip without anyone thinking either is critical to the Eagles’ success. The organizational degree of difficulty is astounding.

Quarterbacks and head coaches tend to get more credit and blame than they deserve, but in the Eagles’ case, the credit-blame distribution leans more toward the blame side.

General manager Howie Roseman, defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and especially running back Saquon Barkley look like the Eagles’ MVPs. Barkley, acquired by Roseman in the offseason, scored on a 60-yard touchdown run before Hurts even attempted a pass during the Eagles’ 55-23 victory over Washington in the NFC Championship Game.

Is this the best offseason in NFL history?

Not one of these players/ coach were on roster a season ago pic.twitter.com/cvTDpNWGm3

— Greg Olsen (@gregolsen88) January 24, 2025

No coach hired since 2000 can top Sirianni’s 48-20 (.706) record through 68 regular-season games with the same team, per TruMedia. Only nine quarterbacks since 1970 can top Hurts’ 46 victories through their first 66 regular-season starts, per Pro Football Reference.

You’d never know it.

The unsolicited emails arrive periodically in reporters’ inboxes during the season. The subject lines advertise “NFL coach firing odds” or something similar. I usually glance at them to get a feel for perceptions.

The 10-1 odds for Sirianni entering the season made him the sixth-most likely coach to be let go first, despite Philly owning the NFL’s fifth-best record (34-17) since hiring him. Those odds shrunk to 4-1, behind only the 1-1 odds for Jacksonville’s Doug Pederson, after the Eagles lost two of their first four games this season.

How fitting was that? The Eagles won a Super Bowl with Pederson, changed starting quarterbacks, fired Pederson, hired Sirianni, reached another Super Bowl with him as their coach and had the NFL’s fifth-best record under him (36-19 through the 2-2 start this season). All that, and Sirianni was considered in danger, while Pederson was becoming expendable for a second time.

Sirianni is outpacing Reid and Pederson (who was indeed fired after the season by Jacksonville) through 68 games of their Eagles tenures, and it’s not particularly close.

As for Hurts, he ranked 11th in 2024 Quarterback Tiers, but the commentary surrounding him leaned negative.

“If they can’t run the ball, Hurts is not effective,” a defensive coordinator said heading into the season. “I think they might have paid a guy that they are going to have to have a really good team around to win games.”

The way two defensive coaches spoke about Hurts this past week — Rex Ryan as an ESPN analyst and Washington’s Joe Whitt Jr., who emphasized treating Hurts as a running back when he carried the ball — affirmed those perceptions.

Hurts was good against the Commanders. Sirianni had his team ready to play. But the next two weeks are shaping up to be a celebration of Mahomes, Reid and the team Roseman has assembled, led by Barkley.

4. The Cowboys got crushed for hiring Brian Schottenheimer as their head coach even though there’s a good chance Dallas will win with him.

Schottenheimer is a perfect fit for the Cowboys as an insider familiar with how the organization operates. That is why so many pushed back against the hire. They want real change in Dallas, not a continuation of the current model featuring Jerry Jones as the year-round face of the franchise, minus any evidence of urgency.

Three decades ago, Jones said he could find 500 coaches to lead his team. More recently, Jones has told other owners that teams are eating too many lucrative contracts for fired coaches. This was another way of saying teams overvalue coaches when pursuing the hottest names.

Jones is correct to a point. His coaches have won whenever the organization had upper-tier quarterbacks, which has been almost all of the time, except for the early 2000s after Troy Aikman retired.

The four coaches Jones hired before Schottenheimer — Mike McCarthy, Jason Garrett, Wade Phillips and Bill Parcells — were among the most successful of their hiring cycles.

McCarthy is the only coach from the 2020 class with a winning record. Garrett won more games than any coach hired in the 2011 cycle while ranking third in win rate (.556) behind John Fox (.719), who teamed with Peyton Manning in Denver, and Jim Harbaugh (.695), who revived San Francisco. Phillips (.607) had the second-best win rate for any coach hired in 2007, trailing Mike Tomlin (.630). Parcells (.531) had the best record for any coach from the 2003 cycle.

Which brings us to Schottenheimer.

The 51-year-old son of 200-game winner Marty Schottenheimer owns 203 NFL games (including playoffs) of play-calling experience over 12 seasons with three teams (that excludes the past two seasons, when McCarthy called plays in Dallas). The offense he coordinated in Seattle from 2018 to ’20 averaged 26.1 points per game in the regular season, third-best since 2000 for any play-calling coordinator with 40-plus games on a team, per TruMedia. Two hot names from this hiring cycle, Ben Johnson and Kellen Moore, are in the top four. Those coaches are younger. Time will tell if they fare better.

It shouldn’t shock anyone if Schottenheimer wins more games over the next two seasons than Johnson wins with the Chicago Bears. He’s got the established quarterback and is taking over a team that owned the NFL’s second-best record from 2021 to ’23, before falling off in 2024.

That is only part of the point here.

The manner in which Jones casually let McCarthy walk, only to replace him with a McCarthy assistant, was the owner’s way of tripling down on business as usual in Dallas.

The Eagles are about to head back to the Super Bowl, but don’t worry gang, Stephen Jones says they’ll have salary cap issues at some point so whose to say who is really running their franchise the right away

— Tom Downey (@WhatGoingDowney) January 26, 2025

Jones, under this approach, has failed to reach the conference championship round since the 1995 season, the longest drought for any team in the NFC. But the Cowboys rank among the NFL’s top 10 in win rate over the past five, 10, 15 and 20 seasons.

“With all the Aikmans and the Romos and the Daks, someone is falling into a Tier 2 quarterback or higher every time,” an exec from another team said. “You are going to be in the mix whether you hire Jason Garrett, Mike McCarthy or really anyone.”

5. The Detroit Lions and Jacksonville Jaguars were floundering when they hired new GMs in January 2021. One victory separated these teams in the standings 45 games into their new GMs’ tenures. What happened?

The Jaguars’ firing of GM Trent Baalke last week provided a good opportunity to stack won-lost records for all the GMs hired in the 2021 cycle. The results are about what one might expect. The Lions’ Brad Holmes resides at the top with a 39-28-1 (.581) record. Baalke resides at the bottom (25-43, .368). It was not always this way.

The Lions and Jaguars were tracking almost identically from 2021 through Week 12 of 2023. That was the week Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence passed for 364 yards as Jacksonville won at Houston to reach 8-3 for the season and 20-25 (.444) during Baalke’s GM run.

“Our guys are learning how to finish,” then-Jaguars coach Doug Pederson said after that game.

That same week, Green Bay scored a 29-22 upset at Detroit, dropping the Lions to 8-3 for the season and 20-24-1 (.456) during Holmes’ GM run. It was a tough defeat, but Detroit, like Jacksonville, loved its trajectory.

One-half game separated the teams in the standings to that point in their respective builds.

The Lions are 19-5 since, tied for the best record in the NFL. The Jaguars are 6-18, tied for the worst.

The Jaguars might have kept pace if Lawrence had developed as hoped, but the Lions’ foundation proved far more stable.

Among the ways:

• Alignment/vision: The Lions hired Holmes before hiring coach Dan Campbell. The Jaguars hired Urban Meyer as coach in 2021, then promoted Baalke to GM a few days later. Meyer was a disaster. The Jaguars fired him after 13 games, hiring Pederson as his successor. While the Lions’ alignment through their GM and coach helped them execute a coherent plan from the beginning, Jacksonville emerged from Meyer’s failure looking to make up lost ground quickly.

• Free agency: The Lions all but sat out free agency in 2021 and 2022, when their biggest investment was a one-year deal for DJ Chark. The Jaguars added Shaqill Griffin ($40 million over three years), Roy Robertson-Harris ($23.4 million over three) and Rayshawn Jenkins ($35 million over four) in 2021, followed a year later by Christian Kirk ($84 million over four), Brandon Scherff ($66 million over four), Foyesade Oluokun ($45 million over three), Darious Williams ($30 million over three) and Foley Fatukasi ($30 million over three).

Some were obvious overpays, but as an executive from another team said of the Jaguars in March 2023, “They did a really good job, and I think just based on the way they are set up, they are set up better than anybody in that division right now.”

• Draft hits: While both teams have used a similar number of picks in early rounds since 2021, Detroit has drafted six Pro Bowl players over that span (Penei Sewell, Jahmyr Gibbs, Aidan Hutchinson, Brian Branch, Sam LaPorta, Amon-Ra St. Brown), compared to just one for Jacksonville (Lawrence, who since faltered). There’s no substitute for drafting and developing. That second part, developing, is sometimes overlooked.

While the Jaguars’ decision to select Travon Walker atop the 2022 draft notably let the Lions pick Hutchinson at No. 2, the draft order in 2021 proved more fateful.

The Jaguars held the first pick and selected Lawrence, a move every other team needing a quarterback likely would have made. The Lions held the seventh pick and knew they wouldn’t have their choice of QBs. They traded Matthew Stafford to the Los Angeles Rams for Jared Goff, two first-round picks and a third-rounder. They used the seventh pick on Sewell, a cornerstone tackle. Goff has outperformed Lawrence with a better team around him. The Lions parlayed the Rams’ picks into a haul of players.

The Jaguars’ spending in free agency might have helped them in the short term, but in retrospect, it appears they lacked the organizational culture, leadership and personnel to sustain success.

Recent events are not encouraging.

6. Two-minute drill: Initial thoughts on the head coach hiring cycle

After diving into the Cowboys’ hiring of Schottenheimer in item No. 4, let’s run through the six other teams that hired coaches or are searching for one.

• Bears: Team president Kevin Warren’s promise to get a new stadium built came to mind when processing why the usually staid Bears made a splash hire with Ben Johnson and were willing to pay a premium salary. The Bears won the press conference and will now bank on Johnson getting more from quarterback Caleb Williams. A process that seemed confusing in the beginning produced a logical result quickly.

• Raiders: Pete Carroll gives the Raiders the charismatic leader they arguably have not had since John Madden was the coach in the 1970s. How much energy will Carroll have to spend managing owner Mark Davis, who listens to the locker room and other advisers, and is therefore prone to frequent pivots? Carroll never had to “manage up” in that way when coaching Seattle or New England. Minority owner Tom Brady and new GM John Spytek might need to make it a tag-team effort.

• Jaguars: See if this sounds like a precursor for long-term stability.

Owner Shad Khan, who entered the 2024 season by declaring his roster the best in franchise history, pursued Liam Coen, a one-year NFL coordinator, as if Coen were Vince Lombardi incarnate. Khan initially retained Baalke, then fired the GM to help land Coen. According to Albert Breer, the Jaguars then kept secret Coen’s second visit to the team so they could trick Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham into satisfying the Rooney Rule for them. They did all this to land a coach with one season of coordinating experience and question marks on his resume.

Coen left the NFL to become Kentucky’s offensive coordinator in 2021. He returned to the NFL in 2022, then rejoined Kentucky as offensive coordinator in 2023, then returned to the NFL in 2024. This past week, Coen interviewed with the Jaguars, withdrew from consideration, accepted (but did not sign) an offer from Tampa Bay contingent upon not re-engaging with Jacksonville, then met with the Jaguars secretly and accepted their offer without keeping the Buccaneers apprised.

• Jets: Some in the league expected the Jets to pair a former head coach with a young GM for search leaders Mike Tannenbaum and/or Rick Spielman to mentor longer term. Instead, the Jets doubled down on first-timers, pairing a first-time head coach (Aaron Glenn) with a first-time GM (Darren Mougey) in the NFL’s most treacherous market. That seems risky even though Glenn projects strength.

• Patriots: Mike Vrabel should be a good fit for New England, but if all parties felt that way, why not use the hiring cycle to conduct a meaningful search? New England would seemingly have lots to learn from outsiders after living life one way since 2000. The Patriots saw no value in conducting a search when they anointed Jerod Mayo as Bill Belichick’s successor, or when deciding to replace Mayo after only one season.

• Saints: New Orleans is the only team still searching for a coach. With the NFL’s eighth-oldest roster on a snap-weighted basis and a leveraged cap situation, the next coach needs to know how ownership views the next couple of seasons. Kellen Moore, Mike Kafka and Mike McCarthy appear to be leading candidates after Glenn took the Jets job without visiting New Orleans. The other candidates no longer available either had little interest in New Orleans (Johnson and Vrabel) or were not on the Saints’ list (Coen, Carroll, Schottenheimer).

(Photo of Patrick Mahomes: Aaron M. Sprecher / Getty Images)