Don’t care about that crap: Why loss helps Chiefs

Andy Reid’s Canton gold jacket won’t have an undefeated regular season stuffed into his handkerchief pocket. And after last week’s 30-21 loss at Buffalo, that’s perfectly fine with the Chiefs’ head coach.

“I don’t really care about all that crap,” Reid told reporters on Monday. “I just go forward and I try to exhaust what team we’re playing, and I present that to the players and expect them to do the same.”

When Reid presents what he’s exhausted this week, as Kansas City (9-1) prepares to visit Carolina (3-7) on Sunday (1 p.m. ET, CBS), he can expect even more focus from his players. Pro Bowl wide receiver Greg Jennings helped Green Bay win a Super Bowl in 2010, then played a key role in the Packers’ 13-0 start in 2011. On FS1’s First Things First Wednesday, Jennings said the loss at Buffalo was a great thing for Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City’s coaching staff.

“You can hammer home now, from a team and coaching perspective, all the points that kind of get glossed over in wins,” Jennings said. “If you drop a ball, or you make a mistake, or you have a bad penalty, or your footwork is bad as Mahomes’ has been, or you throw a couple of interceptions and you still find ways to win, you almost start to feel like, ‘We can’t lose.’”

Jennings said the 16-14 win over Denver on a last-second blocked field goal may have given the Chiefs a false sense of destiny.

“It’s not that they’re going out there feeling like they can just do whatever they want,” Jennings continued, “but now all these things, these mishaps that we’ve seen, these issues that we’ve seen all season long, now you have to really truly address them.”

Addressing issues won’t be limited to the offensive meeting rooms. Steve Spagnuolo’s defense last week allowed 30 points, Kansas City’s most since beating the Eagles, 38-35, in Super Bowl LVII. The Chiefs’ defense didn’t record a sack for only the second time over the last 57 games, including postseason (the other instance was at Buffalo in a 27-24 win over the Bills during the 2023 playoffs). It was a very uncharacteristic defensive performance, but was that somewhat by design?

Jennings said in big games like that, when teams believe they’ll see an opponent again in the playoffs, coordinators routinely trim their game plans because they don’t want to put everything on film. The first tape teams play when preparing for an opponent they’ve seen is film of the first meeting, he said.

Regardless, circle this week on the Chiefs calendar and make an iPhone reminder to check Mahomes’ stats from Week 12 forward. Kansas City is a changed team and Sunday marks the first game of the rest of its season. They won 15 straight after their last loss.  

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