We Never Should’ve Viewed The Chiefs As Underdogs

For the fourth time in five seasons, the Kansas City Chiefs will represent the AFC in the Super Bowl. However, this team is a bit different from the Chiefs teams of the past. This year, we talked about the failures of their wide receivers and said they were as vulnerable as ever.

Many picked them to lose in either the Divisional Round at Buffalo or the AFC Championship at Baltimore. However, the truth is that we never should've viewed the Chiefs as an underdog to begin with. This team is winning in a different way than we've been used to seeing, and that's a good thing. However, a few unlucky bounces caused our public perception of them to change and thus lead to their “underdog” status.

Chiefs Have Learned To Win With Defense

For the first five years of the Patrick Mahomes era, we saw the Chiefs put up historic offensive production. They won many games with the bombs away method, aka Patrick chucking the ball up to Tyreek Hill or Travis Kelce for touchdowns. They were at or near the top of every offensive category for the past five years that when they began winning games a different way, we as fans and viewers didn't know how to respond to it.

The trade of Tyreek Hill to Miami jumpstarted the Chiefs' defense-first attitude. After hitting on defensive players such as Nick Bolton, L’Jarius Sneed, and Willie Gay, the Chiefs used picks from the Hill trade to draft cornerback Trent McDuffie and used their own first round pick to draft pass rusher George Karlaftis. This is all in addition to perennial All-Pro defensive lineman Chris Jones. This season, McDuffie was named First-Team All-Pro as he and Sneed solidified themselves as one of the top cornerback tandems in the league. Meanwhile, the front seven has emerged as one of the game's best, headed by Jones, Karlaftis, and Bolton.

The team’s defensive success is all tied to the coaching of defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo. After the 2018 Chiefs defense held them back from a Super Bowl appearance, Andy Reid dismissed defensive coordinator Bob Sutton and replaced him with Spagnuolo, who has been with the team ever since. The best part for the Chiefs defense is that Spags will be around for the foreseeable future, as he failed as a head coach with the St. Louis Rams in the early 2010s.

That’s not the best part of the team’s so-called underdog story, though. There’s something else we’re not talking about that can't be ignored!

Kadarius Toney Impacted How We Viewed The Chiefs

Chiefs receiver Kadarius Toney has received a lot of justified criticism for his performance this season. In fact, his miscues cost the Chiefs two wins this season.

A dropped pass by Toney in Week 1 against the Detroit Lions directly resulted in a pick-six by Lions safety Brian Branch, the difference in a 21-20 Kansas City loss. Then, in Week 14 against the Bills, an offsides penalty on Toney negated a game-winning touchdown. If not for Toney’s miscues, the Chiefs have 13 wins instead of 11, and would've been the number one seed because they would've held the conference record tiebreaker over the Ravens.

I should also note that dropped passes by the Chiefs’ wide receivers were a big factor in the Week 11 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. If those drops don't happen, Kansas City has 14 wins!

If the Chiefs had won 13-14 games, we never would have viewed them as an underdog and their run to the Super Bowl isn't that surprising. Instead, they would have had home field advantage and once again been on a direct track to the big game. However, the play of Kadarius Toney impacted how we viewed the team this season.

The Chiefs are 1.5-point underdogs to the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 58. This is a game that I won't be picking because of how hard it is. I hope it is a great game, but everyone should know that the Chiefs are not underdogs, and never should've been viewed as that.

Serafino Diaz is a writer at Chaotically Intolerant, Phoenix's finest Vikings, Bucks, and Cubs fan, traveling everywhere I can.