The Kansas City Chiefs are going to face a major problem this season after the way they have built themselves up in the past few years, former head coach Herm Edwards believes.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes are the modern-day New England Patriots and Tom Brady, with the Chiefs establishing themselves as the preeminent franchise in the NFL and Mahomes as the best quarterback that the league has seen in some time.
What that has brought them has been five straight AFC Championship games (all of them at home, a first in NFL history), three trips to the Super Bowl and two Super Bowl championships to create a dynasty that could go toe to toe with any that the NFL has produced in it’s entire history, whether it be those Patriots teams, the Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s or the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s.
And Herm Edwards, who coached the Chiefs from 2006-2008, thinks that their status as one of the league’s all-time great sides could hurt them this upcoming season.
Can the Kansas City Chiefs keep the rest of the NFL at bay?
Speaking on NFL Live, Edwards spoke about the status that the Chiefs had reached and what that is going to mean to the teams that they are going to play this season, and whether or not they will have the ability to handle getting every team’s ‘best’ every single week:
Every week, you're somebody's big game, you're the hunted now. Everybody is going to play good against the Chiefs, because they know they're the world's champion. And that's what you’ve got to understand and these players have to understand, you're going to get your opponent's best game every week. That’s 17 games, people are going to be up to play you to try to beat you.
And that's what you’ve got to guard against. You can't have a letdown because you're good enough, you're talented enough to go right back to where you went last year. But the problem is, can you keep your energy level up, week in and week out?
The Chiefs should have experience of this by now
Edwards’ point is a good one, but doesn’t factor in the fact that they have had to go down this road a few times before as they’ve ascended to this stage, and teams will already be giving it their all when they face them, which is why we’ve had so many good games between them as well as the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals, and why we even had teams like the Indianapolis Colts beat them last year.
So they can clearly handle the pressure of being the top dogs, the question is whether the other teams will have improved enough to give them a challenge along the way.