Mad Dog Sports Radio channel<\/a>, and he talked about the competition in the West.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s a tough division. It was a tough division last year,\u201d Karlaftis said. \u201cThree of the four teams made it to the playoffs. So that should tell you all you need to know. But when we played, I mean, we beat the Broncos once (last season), lost to them once, and when we beat them, it was off of a blocked kick in the last second. And then with the Chargers, we beat them on a last second field goal. So they\u2019re all tight games.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven with the Raiders, too, like tight games all around. It\u2019s a tough division. And it\u2019s most important, we gotta win all the games in our division or as many as we can. It\u2019s a tough division, just like I keep saying. We got a lot of respect for the teams in our division. They\u2019re great coaches, great players. It\u2019s gonna be tough. And we\u2019re good with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chiefs have lost the only division game they\u2019ve played this season, when the Chargers beat them in Brazil in the season-opener. The Chiefs dropped their first two games, and some pundits wondered if Kansas City was in for a down season.<\/p>\n
But the Chiefs have won their last two games by double-digit margins, first beating the Giants and then the Ravens last Sunday.<\/p>\n
Karlaftis didn\u2019t make an excuse for how the season started.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlat out, I could just say that we just weren\u2019t good enough those first couple games,\u201d Karlaftis said. \u201cWe found our rhythm in New York, and then we continued that on to the next week … and we\u2019ll continue that on. But just didn\u2019t start off hot, and coach (Andy) Reid and the staff challenged us as players to be better. And there was adversity. And there are two things that you could do: You could lay down or you could step up and come to the plate, and that\u2019s what we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chiefs played their most complete game of the season in Sunday\u2019s 37-20 rout of the Ravens at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.<\/p>\n
While there still may be doubters, Karlaftis said the Chiefs only have one thing to prove.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that the sky\u2019s the limit for us as a team. The only thing we have to prove to people is that we could win,\u201d he said. \u201cWe could prove that to ourselves every single day. And that\u2019s a heck of a football team we beat (Sunday). We have a lot of respect for them. We\u2019ve seen them, and it\u2019s been close games every time we\u2019ve played them the past couple years. So, we feel good.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter watching tape, there\u2019s a lot of stuff we can improve and get better on, kind of moving forward. And we\u2019re feeling good right now, but we know that there\u2019s a lot of work to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One ironclad truism about sports is that all streaks eventually come to an end. That doesn\u2019t matter if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2063],"tags":[787,346,70855,7,118,110,2438,2437,4247,9666,6,27300],"class_list":{"0":"post-414904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-chiefs","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-chiefs","10":"tag-chiefs-george-karlaftis-shares-thoughts-on-the-afc-west-race","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-kansas-city","13":"tag-kansas-city-chiefs","14":"tag-kansascity","15":"tag-kansascitychiefs","16":"tag-local-news","17":"tag-newsbreak","18":"tag-nfl","19":"tag-the-kansas-city-star"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115306188305980023","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}