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The Kansas City Chiefs aren’t shying away from the truth: they’ve been beating themselves.
After a string of penalties and uncharacteristic errors — both of which were on full display in Monday night’s 31-28 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars — head coach Andy Reid and quarterback Patrick Mahomes each pointed to execution and discipline as the difference between the team’s current struggles and the standard they’ve set in recent years.
“I always go back just to the basics,” said Reid of Monday’s special teams penalties, which were a big factor in the most recent of their three narrow losses. “The angles that you take are so big on special teams to put yourself in position to block. When you’re doing it in space, you’ve got to be disciplined, [so] that you don’t let your hands grab any cloth. The best way to do it is [to] go out and practice fast.”
Costly penalties have been a recurring theme in this season’s losses — something Reid acknowledged is hurting both field position and rhythm.
“We’ve got to take care of that,” he said. “That’s something we’ve got to fix. It’s getting us right now — and you can’t do that. So again, the best way to do it is you go out and practice it — and make sure you’re working on the things that have been causing the problems.”
It doesn’t help that in today’s NFL, the margin for error is razor-thin.
“That’s this league right now,” Reid reminded his listeners. “There’s so much parity. That’s why I mentioned [those] after the game: the penalties, turnovers and so on. You can’t have those.
“Games are too close. [There’s] too much competition — equal competition. You’ve got to take care of business there. My responsibility is to make sure that’s done.”
For Mahomes, it’s obvious: the Chiefs are playing good football — but not the kind of clean, decisive football that turns close games into wins.
“It’s pretty much execution,” he told reporters this week. “Just little things here and there. We’re just not making winning football plays in certain moments. And if it goes down to the interception in the red zone that I threw [on Monday]? I mean, that’s a 14-point swing.”
Still, Mahomes believes progress is being made. It just needs to show up in critical moments.
“I feel like we’ve played better these last few weeks,” he said. “But in this league, it’s going to come down to one-score games. That’s what Coach Reid preaches right when we start off training camp every single year. And it’s about who executes at a higher level. We haven’t done that as a team throughout these first five or six weeks.”
Mahomes also praised running backs Isiah Pacheco, Kareem Hunt and Brashard Smith for providing a spark to the offense in Jacksonville.
“When we’re able to run the ball like that — and then be able to play-action and do bootlegs off of it — it really opens up the entire offense,” he said. “Both those guys — really all three — ran hard when they got the ball. The offensive line did a great job. You can tell their chemistry is building — and I think that’ll keep improving as the season goes on.”
Heading into Sunday night’s primetime matchup against the Detroit Lions, the message from Kansas City’s leaders was consistent: the Chiefs don’t need to reinvent themselves. They just need to clean up the details.
“It’s little things,” noted Mahomes. “We know what we need to do. We just have to go out and do it.”
