Could this finally be the season that the Chiefs lose their AFC West champions title which seems to have been theirs for year upon year, well they have been the champions of this division for the last nine years but the team that last held the AFC West title that threaten that sequence, the Denver Broncos, writes ANDY RICHMOND.
That divisional win back in 2015 saw the Broncos win Super Bowl 50 against the Panthers 24-10, and at 8-2 nobody would rule out Denver repeating that feat.
Some of the Broncos victories have not pretty but you can’t fault the attitude and relentless will to win of Denver, that was probably best underlined by their Houdini like win against the Giants where having been held scoreless for three quarters they scored 33 points in the final quarter to run out 33-32 winners and they now welcome the Chiefs to Mile High in a game that could, should the Broncos win essentially knock the Chiefs out of contention for the AFC West crown.
A lot of the credit for those gritty, ugly wins has to go to the Denver defence which has fuelled a seven game winning streak by way of a plus-35 sack differential, the largest by any team in the first 10 games of a season in NFL history. When looking at the W’s in the results column nobody will really care if they beat the Raiders by three, the Jets by two and the Giants by one, although the Chiefs a perennial thorn in their side will prove to be a tougher test. Despite trailing in all ten games this season the Broncos are 8-2 SU and .500 ATS at 4-4-1.
In fact Denver have scored first just once in their ten games this season, but they are 5-0 at home and haven’t lost at home since last October (Denver have won 10 consecutive home games, the longest active streak in the league) and here despite facing a team that contains Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes they have the much better record than Kansas City who are 5-4 and just 1-3 on the road. The Chiefs are looking to avoid losing two straight games for the second time this season (started 0-2). They haven’t lost two straight multiple times in a season since 2017.
The Chiefs do come into this off a bye though and off a pause that often refreshes Chiefs HC Andy Reid along with Mahomes are dangerous opponents. When Mahomes faces an AFC West opponent off any extended prep time, KC are 11-1 SU, losing to the Raiders on Christmas of 2023, including 5-0 SU in road/neutral games. Reid and Mahomes are 34-10 SU when on any extended prep times as a duo during the season (not counting Week 1), of those 44 total games, they have faced an opponent with a better record just six times – Kansas City are 3-3 SU in those games.
Despite those facts the Chiefs face a Denver defence that has seen opponents convert a league-low 37.5% of their red zone trips into touchdowns and whilst the Chiefs have scored on 50% of their drives, 2nd in the league they are one of three teams without an offensive play of 50-plus yards. The Browns and Titans are the others.
Offensively though it’s always hard to write the Chiefs off even when they are playing a defence that has performed as well as the Denver one has this season. The Chiefs will be facing one of the NFL’s best defensive fronts with an offensive line that has been unsettled for weeks and is facing its biggest test yet and they will be doing their best to disrupt and take any rhythm out of Mahomes and the Chiefs offence.
Mahomes will have the “luxury” of facing a Broncos defence that is missing a couple of important pieces, particularly top CB Patrick Surtain II, but Mahomes has thrown for 300+ yards in just one of nine starts this season, while the Broncos have allowed a league-low eight passing TDs. In the Chiefs four losses, defences have hit Mahomes an average of 9.3 times, including 15 hits by the Bills two weeks ago, compared with just 5.8 times in the Chiefs five wins and keeping the fearsome Broncos pass rush away from Mahomes will be one of the keys to this game.
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Without their top running back, Isiah Pacheco and facing a top ranked run defence all the signs would point to a game where the Chiefs put the ball in Mahomes hands and trust him to get them where they need to be especially if he can deliver the ball quickly and efficiently. That’s not to say that the Denver pass defence is an easy one to navigate but without Surtain and Mahomes ability to extend plays it would be their best way of finding a way to win this game. This isn’t an easy matchup for Mahomes or his two leading wide receivers in Rashee Rice and Xavier Woirthy, with DeVonta Smith of the Eagles the only wide receiver to hit the 100 yards receiving mark against the Broncos this season. Rice has not faced Denver since his rookie season, when he had games of 4-72-0 and 4-56-0 but he runs a high-percentage route tree (often first read for Mahomes) and has the dominant usage numbers in the red zone. Worthy was added to the injury report on Thursday so his status is worth monitoring near game time but he would be the big play threat that Mahomes would be looking for especially with Surtain missing from the Denver secondary.
Many thought that TE Travis Kelce would be kept under wraps this season but he’s been playing well if not quite producing at the level of previous years. Kelce’s 13.2 yards-per-reception average is his highest since 2020, while Kelce’s 10.2 yards per target are the most of his career and he has over 60 receiving yards in four of his last five games. He should be well rested here off a bye and ready for another big workload in this borderline must-win game.
Whilst there are some big positives surrounding the Denver defence, the same can’t quite be said of the offence which has looked wildly inconsistent against a variety of opposition. A lot of their struggles have come on their failure to make a success of early downs often leaving them in tough situations on later downs leading to mistakes, miscues, and sacks for QB Bo Nix. Nix hasn’t been helped out by a run game that has struggled and is now without J.K. Dobbins through injury with rookie RB RJ Harvey now taking the lead role. The Chiefs defence isn’t as fierce and dominant as the Broncos but they are led by one of the best defensive coordinators in the game Steve Spagnuolo. Expect the Chiefs to be solid against the run and creative and aggressive in their pressures of Nix this week.
Nix needs Harvey and the rest of the offence to gain yards on first and second downs as the last thing that the Broncos will want is Nix having to drop back on third-and-long and have to try and work out the complicated Chiefs coverages and blitzes that have confused and confounded plenty of young quarterbacks. Harvey has limited usage as a runner to this point (only 50 attempts) with mixed results. He has been inconsistent but has also mixed in some splash runs and it’s not impossible that we will see one of those explosive runs here.
The Chiefs have historically been good against wide receivers and this season is no different, conceding a league-low 1,019 yards to that position. With the Broncos likely to get WR Marvin Mims back after a two game absence, the pass offence will look to have a little more versatility contained within it and Mims could see plenty of work with the Broncos using him to gain quick short passing early yardage that will give Nix a better chance to control events on third down. Deeper threats such as Courtland Sutton and the ever emerging Troy Franklin won’t disappear but it’s surely more important to get the offence in rhythm via short quick passing and leave the intermediate and deep passing game where Sutton and Franklin thrive when the game opens up. Franklin has actually started to move past Sutton in recent weeks and would be the preferred option out of those two as he’s led the team in targets in four straight games, matching Sutton in targets in a fifth game.
As good as the Denver defence is stopping Mahomes is difficult and there have been times when lesser quarterbacks than Mahomes have dropped points on them. This is likely to be a competitive game and it seems unlikely that either team gets blown out because the Chiefs never get blown out and Denver at home with a strong defence won’t just go away.
The Chiefs are 0-4 in close games this year while the Broncos are 5-2 with four comeback wins in the fourth quarter. But the Broncos have also blown two fourth quarter leads in their losses, and Mahomes has never lost five straight one-score games in his career. The main question we may have to ask is can Nix match Mahomes and play mistake free football on offence so that his defence don’t have to bail him out with the pressure of putting the Chiefs out of the divisional race weighing heavily here.
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