The Kansas City Chiefs’ arc in 2024 and now 2025 is surely one of the most fascinating in NFL history. Kansas City followed its pair of Super Bowl wins in 2022 and 2023 with a three-peat bid that superficially came close to succeeding — they did go all the way to Super Bowl LIX, after all, before being stopped by the Philadelphia Eagles — but saw their scoring differential collapse by 1.1 points per game year-over-year and 4.0 PPG from the legitimately dominant +7.5 mark they had in 2022, the first of those consecutive championship seasons.
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Rather than dominating last year, K.C. instead relied on an increasingly absurd string of close wins — 17 straight in one-score games at one point — which led to them having the luckiest season by an NFL team since the 1970 merger according to Pythagorean win percentage (which estimates the record a team “should” have based on its points for and against). In concert with their convincing Super Bowl defeat, that always meant the Chiefs were going to be an extremely tough team to get a read on in 2025… and that remains true even now.
Yes, despite a crushing loss to the Houston Texans on Sunday night that dropped K.C.’s postseason odds somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, forcing them to win out from here just to have a coin-flip’s chance at making the playoffs, the incredible thing about the 2025 Chiefs is that they have actually been better on paper than the 2024 version was — and more resistant to the dreaded Super Bowl Loser’s Curse as well, though you’d never know it from the topline results and their likelihood to miss the postseason.