Football Bytes: Can the Chiefs Keep Winning Ugly?
Plus, the Falcons are losing the kicking battle by a historic margin.
Welcome to Football Bytes — a spin-off of my baseball column that I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various football spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Football Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 Kings of the Close Call
Before 2024, the Kansas City Chiefs had never started 9-0 in a season with Patrick Mahomes as their starting quarterback. (And the franchise had only done it twice before, period: in 2003 with Trent Green, and under the watch of Alex Smith in 2013.) You can’t say that anymore, however, after K.C. beat the Denver Broncos on Sunday — as the two-time defending champions extended their winning streak to 15 games overall and continued their leadership in the Super Bowl odds.
All business as usual, right?
Well, maybe. I’ve noted before that Mahomes is the master of doing whatever he needs in order to win football games, and this year is no exception. He leads all QBs in both fourth-quarter comebacks and game-winning drives, having performed the latter in four of K.C.’s nine wins. But something is also clearly not quite firing on cylinders for the champs, requiring them to win in increasingly uncomfortable ways.
Take that win against Denver. The Chiefs trailed 14-3 at one point before coming back to take a slim 16-14 lead in the fourth — but with plenty of time for the Broncos to retake command. Bo Nix’s offense proceeded to march down the field and chew up just about the entire final six minutes of clock in regulation, eventually reaching the Chiefs’ 17 before putting the game on the leg of Wil Lutz… whose 35-yarder was blocked Leo Chenal as time expired.
That was the Chiefs’ fifth game decided by a touchdown or less this season, and they’ve (obviously) won all of them. There’s something to be said for coming up clutch, whether with the arm of Mahomes, a big special-teams play or a defensive stop.1 But it’s also true that winning ugly can eventually catch up with a contender — or is at least less preferable than winning big.
As has been pointed out elsewhere this week, Kansas City has the lowest point differential (+58) of any team to start a season 9-0. That sounds like an insult, but it could also be a compliment, like being the least famous actor to win an Oscar or having the smallest yacht in Monaco. But it’s no artifact of K.C.’s circumstances — it’s true even if we adjust the Chiefs’ PPG margin for the Elo ratings of the teams they’ve faced:
The big question is whether winning so many nail-biters portends doom for the Chiefs over the rest of the season. And that part is less clear.
Every team who starts a season strong is destined for some kind of regression to the mean, with only a few exceptions. To wit: Among 9-0 teams in the 16+ game schedule era, only the 2015 Carolina Panthers (whom I once stupidly called the worst 11-0 team, for whatever reason)2 and the 1985 Bears actually had a better schedule-adjusted PPG margin over the rest of the regular season than they’d compiled over Games 1-9.
But does getting to 9-0 in a more dominant fashion mean anything to how much a team regresses? There does seem to be some effect, though it is not statistically significant. Of the 18 previous teams to begin a season 9-0 in seasons with a 16+ game schedule, here are the rest-of-season results if we split the group in half by schedule-adjusted PPG margin through Games 1-9:
Most dominant teams: Won 75.0% of games, +8.8 SOS-adjusted margin
Least dominant teams: Won 63.9% of games, +5.6 SOS-adjusted margin
Clearly, we might expect a team who got to 9-0 in an uglier fashion to do worse from here. However, we must stress again that neither difference is significant — and the Chiefs themselves might present an edge case that’s especially difficult to draw conclusions from.
As mediocre as their +6.4 PPG margin is relative to teams who started 9-0, Kansas City’s differential per game was even worse (+4.5) during the regular season last year. That was the seventh-lowest PPG differential of any team who ever went on to win the Super Bowl, but it didn’t feel like the Chiefs were a plucky underdog in the mold of the Eli Manning Giants or Joe Flacco Ravens because they had Mahomes — and they’d just won a Super Bowl the year before with a much more standard +7.5 margin.
Similarly, this year’s Chiefs are clear favorites in my Elo forecast because they have a star QB with a long track record of success, particularly in the playoffs, and they’re overwhelmingly likely to be back in the postseason as a division champ with a high seed this year. I’m sure K.C. themselves would prefer to be winning these games in more convincing fashion. But they know more than anyone that, while the wins are nice now (regardless of how they come), the games that really matter are still many weeks away.
🏈 Kicked While They’re Down
Loyal reader John D. wrote in with a question about the Falcons’ field goal differential, after Atlanta’s formerly reliable kicker Younghoe Koo missed three field goals against the Saints in Sunday’s 3-point loss while counterpart (and Football Bytes favorite) Blake Grupe went 2-for-2.
“Over the last two seasons, Falcons opponents are now 63 of 65 on field goal attempts, with 0 misses this season. Meanwhile, Koo missed 3 field goals today (one blocked) and that was the difference as the Falcons lost by 3. I think it’s a hidden story people don’t think about, but it has really been costing the Falcons over the last two seasons.
The interesting question to me is how much of it is luck. I don’t think it’s 100% luck/bad luck, but I don’t know. That’s why I think it’ll be such a good piece for you. And the timing is perfect with Koo having three failed field goal attempts just today, which is more than their opponents have had COMBINED over the last 27 games now covering the last two seasons. I find that to be absolutely astounding.”
John is right that this is a wild stat. Over the past two seasons, only the Tennessee Titans (whose opponents also went 63-for-65) have seen their opponents kick for as high a percentage as Atlanta’s 96.9% opposing FG percentage. And since the Falcons’ own FG% has been just 80.3% over that span, they have a league-worst -16.6% FG percentage differential — a stat I just made up, but one in which Atlanta is nearly twice as bad relative to average as the next-worst team, the New England Patriots (-8.9%).
Exactly how much has this cost the Falcons? We can judge how many points above or below average a team’s kicking has been by comparing their field goal success by distance to the league average for each bucket of kick lengths. (We’ll also throw extra points in there, just for fun.) By this accounting, Atlanta’s own kicking has been worth -8.7 points already this season and -9.1 over the past two seasons combined. Meanwhile, their opponents have outkicked the NFL average by +11.1 points this season and a whopping 21.6 points over the past two seasons.
So Atlanta’s net value of -30.7 total KPAA in that span is by FAR the worst in the league, more than twice as bad as the second-worst team, the Rams (at -15.3):
The Falcons are so bad in that regard this year that their current Net KPAA per game of -1.98 is on pace to be the worst in a single season since at least 1991 (the earliest season I have data on kick ranges via SportRadar). The previous “record” belonged to the 2009 Houston Texans, who posted -1.68 Net KPAA per game.
The good news for Atlanta is that kicking success or failure does seem to be quite random from season to season. Looking at year-over-year KPAA per game numbers from 1991 through 2023, here are the coefficients of correlation and determination:
In general, this means we would expect such poor kicking stats (particularly in terms of opponents’ KPAA) to regress heavily to the mean. But then again, we’ve almost never seen a team this bad across back-to-back seasons before — the two-year record low in our sample is -36.5 Net KPAA by the 1991-92 San Francisco 49ers — so Koo and the Falcons’ special teams might be a true outlier in the realm of kicking futility.
Filed under: NFL, Football Bytes
Like the stuffed fourth-down run in the red zone that preserved K.C.’s win over Atlanta earlier in the year.
Once you get to 11-0, being the worst in that club is sort of irrelevant. It’s an impressive start and that was a stupid clickbait article.
Regression? Yes. Collapse? No. As you rightly say, KC is an edge case. When you have the best pressure player in the game, deep postseason experience, and can win defensively if needed...you can win it.
This same question was asked about the Bulls in the 90s...."can they keep winning on last second shots by Jordan?"
Well, yes they can. As Green Day reminds us, "it's not a question, but a lesson learned in time."