KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The headline splashed across the South Jersey Courier-Post’s sports section 19 years ago today — Dec. 4, 2006 — with a question looming above coach Andy Reid’s Philadelphia Eagles:

Is that all there is?

The 2006 Eagles, after a sustained run of success under Reid, were 5-6. And their season seemed to be circling the drain quickly as well.

Courier-Post columnist Kevin Roberts embraced the topic head-on. “Experts disagree whether the Eagles can be good again or need to rebuild,” was his subhead. And the text that followed painted a bleak picture.

“No one,” Roberts wrote, “talks about the playoffs with a straight face anymore.”

A funny thing happened on that particular Monday, however — with a relevant backstory for the 2025 Kansas City Chiefs.

The Eagles won that night against the Carolina Panthers to improve to 6-6. Then they won the next game. And the one after that, too.

Philadelphia ended that regular season with five consecutive wins, earning a spot in the NFC playoffs before eventually bowing out in the divisional round.

Those Eagles shared a commonality with the 2025 Chiefs: Even after shifting to backup quarterback Jeff Garcia following an injury to Donovan McNabb, they appeared — statistically — to be on the verge of a breakout even before they actually broke out.

The proof comes in the advanced numbers. FTN Fantasy analyst Aaron Schatz’s data goes back to the 1978 season, and in that time, the 2006 Eagles ranked (on a per-play basis) as his sixth-best 6-6 team in NFL history.

No. 10 on that list? This year’s Chiefs.

And history has been kind to these types of teams whose early results haven’t always matched their down-by-down production.

Among those nine best 6-6 NFL teams in Schatz’s all-encompassing DVOA metric, no squad finished with a worse-than-.500 record in its remaining games. The group also combined to go 27-10 over the rest of the regular season.

How DVOA’s best 6-6 NFL teams fared

Record after 6-6 start

2004 Bills

3-1

2002 Chiefs

2-2

1999 Raiders

2-2

2023 Bills

5-0

1986 Vikings

3-1

2006 Eagles

4-0

2019 Cowboys

2-2

1991 49ers

4-0

1991 Vikings

2-2

2025 Chiefs

?

Two teams rallied for the playoffs. That included the 2006 Eagles under Reid and a more recent team that the Chiefs can look to for inspiration:

The 2023 Buffalo Bills.

An Associated Press story from Buffalo’s 6-6 start that season could basically be copied and pasted as the narrative for this year’s Chiefs.

Among the Bills’ issues, according to that report?

• The team losing all its games by six points or less.

• Offense, defense and special teams taking turns in letting down during those defeats.

• A coach, this time Sean McDermott, saying this about his team: “We’re this close.”

The Bills might be the best comparison for this year’s Chiefs, given both teams had access to a seventh AFC playoff spot (added in 2020) and a 17th NFL regular-season game (a change that started in 2021).

Buffalo didn’t end up needing that wiggle room, though. It won its final five regular-season games, moving all the way up to the AFC’s No. 2 seed before eventually losing a home playoff game to Kansas City.

This year’s Chiefs have their own befuddling set of statistics to go with a disappointing .500 record. K.C. is 1-6 in one-score games, and per TruMedia, leads the NFL in yards per drive (39.3) while ranking second in percentage of scoring possessions (49.1 percent).

Combine all that, and since 2020, the Chiefs’ plus-73 point margin through 13 weeks is the second best of any .500-or-worse NFL team. The only one better was the 2023 Bills (plus-101).

So no, the Chiefs aren’t where they want to be record-wise. But an understanding of their past dopplegangers does help frame Reid’s message from Wednesday as his team prepared for a home game Sunday against the Houston Texans.

Reid has spoken repeatedly this week about maintaining a positive attitude to correct mistakes. He said Wednesday that the reason for the glass-half-full view is that he’s “big on reality” and wants to promote communication that reflects where his team stands.

So what does he think of his 6-6 Chiefs right now?

“We’re very close,” Reid said. “You’ve just got to take care of business.”

Other Chiefs players had similar sentiments on Wednesday.

Center Creed Humphrey said it was important for teammates to circulate the belief this week that “the ship’s not sinking or anything.” A different set of circumstances might call for more drastic changes, in other words, but this wasn’t one of those cases.

Chiefs cornerback Trent McDuffie said coaches had been preaching to make this a “December to remember” while remaining positive. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes, meanwhile, said his own evaluation of the Chiefs was that they simply needed to make more plays in critical moments.

“We can be close, but you can’t be close for too long. You’ve got to go out there and make it happen,” Mahomes said. “I think we’ve got the guys to do that, but we’ve got to go out there and prove it.”

For Reid, it could make sense to draw on his past as he tries to lead this team back toward a potential playoff spot.

In his 27th year as an NFL head coach, after all, he has been through rough patches with good teams before.

And in 2006, that even included a moment where questions loomed about more than the state of his current team.

Is that all there is?

Those Eagles followed with a definitive answer.

Could the 2025 Chiefs do the same?

“Whatever I say here … it’s what you do. That’s where you’re at,” Reid said Wednesday. “You’ve got to do it and fix the issues, because we’re very close.”