The Kansas City Chiefs are staring at their most precarious position in over a decade.
A Thanksgiving defeat to the Dallas Cowboys dropped the two-time defending champions to 6-6, leaving them four games behind the runaway Denver Broncos in the AFC West and two full games out of the final Wild Card berth. Making matters worse, all three teams currently occupying those Wild Card positions own head-to-head tiebreakers over Kansas City.
In short, the Chiefs likely need to win out — and still get outside help — if they hope to extend their streak of ten consecutive postseason appearances.
Yet even with their backs against the wall, head coach Andy Reid delivered an oddly colorful message to the rest of the league as the 2025 regular season enters its final month.
“I’m telling you, we’re going to go after you every game,” Reid said. “That’s how we roll. We’re going to try to tickle your tonsils on every play, every game, but that’s the attitude that we’re coming in with, and you let the chips fall where they may.”
The 2025 campaign has been an uncharacteristic struggle for a rollercoaster for the Chiefs from the opening kickoff.
Kansas City stumbled out of the gates with consecutive losses to the Los Angeles Chargers and Philadelphia Eagles, then barely escaped with a victory over the New York Giants in Week 3. A promising five-wins-in-six-games stretch followed and suggested normalcy had returned, only for the bottom to fall out again. Over the past four weeks, the Chiefs have dropped three contests while committing a series of atypical errors that have become their undoing.
The once-ironclad grip on the AFC West appears all but over. Denver sits at 10-2 and has shown zero signs of a late-season collapse, putting Kansas City’s nine-year division-title streak in serious jeopardy.
The remaining schedule offers little relief.This Sunday brings a surging Houston Texans squad to Arrowhead, followed by a critical rematch with the Chargers in Week 15. A late-season showdown with the Broncos is bookended by dates against the Tennessee Titans and Las Vegas Raiders — hardly the soft landing a desperate team craves.
For a franchise that has reached five of the last six Super Bowls, the prospect of watching January football from home feels foreign. Whether Reid’s squad can summon one final surge — tonsil-tickling intensity and all — will determine if the Chiefs’ historic playoff streak lives to see an eleventh year.
