Why the Chiefs’ path to the AFC’s No. 1 seed is a lesson (and sign) for their future

Chiefs coach Andy Reid stood behind a lectern, articulating the journey of a regular season that had just concluded, even as we all know what’s most important is what awaits. This era of Chiefs football is long past being judged by playoff seeding, replaced instead by what they do with it.

But there is a correlation between the two, and in order to ascertain the latter, it’s important to understand the former.

Never has that exercise been more worthwhile than today — because never had the entire operation been so thoroughly tested.

Yet here they stand.

And here stands Reid, midway through an answer trying to put all of this into words, when he finds an out — like a quarterback suddenly seeing his tight end open over the middle.

A smile first.

Then a point toward the back of the room.

Toward Mahomes.

“He’s taking a bow back there,” Reid said.

He’s hit on the main point now.

The Chiefs secured the No. 1 seed in the AFC postseason Saturday with a 31-13 road win against the Raiders. They have tied a franchise record for most wins in a regular season. And next they’re heading to the postseason — after a luxurious week off, of course — after playing their most complete game in Las Vegas.

Of all years.

The year in which they shipped wide receiver Tyreek Hill to Miami. The year in which they let the vocal leaders of their defense walk out the door, despite requesting more time. The year in which they were forced to allocate more snaps to rookies than any secondary in football.

That’s the look of this year’s No. 1 seed.

Sure, the implications of the past week helped vault them there, or at least give them the opportunity to vault there Saturday. But this story applies whether we are talking about the No. 1 seed or a 14-3 record. We just happen to be talking about both.

The 2022 regular season provided the Chiefs with some answers they had hoped would come but could not be assured. That’s after the spring and summer had required their front office to take a step back and analyze the big picture.

Win now?

Or win later?

Ultimately, the Chiefs bet their constants would allow both. And here’s what they have discovered over the past four months: the constants outweighed the change.

Reid used a few fingers to point toward one of them. He might as well have used his thumb to point inward toward the other.

Absent one of the game’s truly great weapons, Reid built the league’s No. 1 offense in both scoring and yardage, and not since 2018 has that been accurate. He was forced to look at the Rubik’s cube through a different lens yet match the pieces all the same. The Chiefs are less player-dependent with their offensive weapons and more system-dependent.

Except for one, perhaps two.

Mahomes will almost certainly win his second MVP award later this month. Without Hill, the leading wide receiver in each of his first four seasons as a starter, Mahomes set an NFL record Saturday for most total yards in a single season. Yes, I know the league only recently added a game to its schedule. Still, an adjustment to the personnel prompted him to make adjustments in how he sees the entire field and progresses through his reads.

In the end, it’s the most unusual path the Chiefs have taken to arrive in this top spot, but also the most revealing one. It could impact their future, or at least their future decision-making.

The cliff notes of an offseason defined by change is the Chiefs elected to extend their championship window — to ensure they had enough funds in looming years, both financially and within the constraints of a salary-cap league — and hope they still had enough to make a run at it all in the meantime.

Ultimately, that validation will not come from one final regular-season victory Saturday. “We still have some games left here,” Reid said, after all. But the point is that validation still could come immediately. This experiment might still provide the results in its first trial phase.

The hope is by keeping an eye on the future, you don’t cost yourself a shot at the present, even as some of their top competitors play the role of contrarian — you might remember that this was the year the division was supposed to play some catch-up.

When you’re the No. 1 seed in the conference, you tend to have a shot. FiveThirtyEight gives the Chiefs by far the best shot to win the Super Bowl (as do the betting markets), with a 25% chance. The Bills are second at 18%.

That’s a considerable gap, and the Chiefs didn’t need to sacrifice subsequent chances to create it. In fact, they preserved them.

As some of us have long been wondering whether the Chiefs kept enough in the tank to still put together a season like this, they’ve undoubtedly been discovering the answer to a different question.

Was it worth it?

The answer?

So far.