Did the Chiefs Forget How to Take Risks?
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The AFC West used to feel automatic: you wrote in “Chiefs – division champs” in ink and moved on. Ten weeks into 2025, that script is flipped. Kansas City sits at 5–5 after a 22–19 loss in Denver, while the Broncos are 9–2, riding an eight-game win streak and sitting on top of both the division and the AFC.
On paper, this shouldn’t be a total collapse story. Mahomes is still Mahomes and the defense is good enough to win. But the Chiefs have completely lost their edge in tight games. After entering the year on an NFL-record 17-game run in one-score contests, they’re now 0–5 in games decided by eight points or fewer. Instead of the wild, aggressive, “we’ll steal this in the fourth” Chiefs, we’re seeing a version that settles for safer calls, shorter throws, and lets close games slip away.
Meanwhile, Denver is doing exactly what Kansas City used to do to everyone else—winning in the margins. The Broncos’ defense has hammered opposing QBs, and models now give them about a 77% chance to win the AFC Westand around a 97% shot to make the playoffs, numbers that would’ve sounded impossible a year ago.
The Chiefs aren’t dead, but the road just got steep. After the loss, their odds to win the division have slid to roughly +500, while they’re still favored at about -220 just to make the postseason and around +1000 to win it all—more “dangerous wild card” than automatic juggernaut. To change the story, Kansas City has to lean back into calculated risk: more aggression on fourth down, more trust in Mahomes to flip games, and far fewer self-inflicted mistakes in crunch time. Otherwise, 2025 might go down as the year the AFC West crown quietly moved from Arrowhead to Mile High and stayed there.
Sources:
| KCTV5