The Athletic:

8. The Chiefs’ defense has been a disaster.

The truth is it might not matter. Kansas City’s formula for success revolves around producing an elite offense with the best player on the planet. The defense just has to be passable. Having said that, Steve Spagnuolo’s group has a long way to go to get to passable.

Through two weeks, the Chiefs rank dead last in defensive EPA per play. For context, they were 19th last year and 18th in 2019.

Against the Ravens, Kansas City got a pair of interceptions, including a pick-six, from Tyrann Mathieu. But aside from those two plays, the defense struggled. The Chiefs had just one sack and one QB hit.

TruMedia tracks a metric called success rate. Based on EPA, it looks at every play to determine whether the offense got closer to scoring or further away from scoring. The Chiefs’ success rate of 41.4 percent on defense ranks 32nd through two weeks.

Again, there’s no need to overreact. The Chiefs are obviously still on the short list of Super Bowl favorites. But if the defense doesn’t improve, Kansas City could find itself in a number of shootouts in the weeks ahead.


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Don’t do that to that man. He can’t take the field. & his shit work. Hold me accountable, I can handle it… that’s a good man & a damn good coach.

— Tyrann Mathieu (@Mathieu_Era) September 21, 2021

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Honey Badger gone next year. Too bad he’s the only one worth a shit on this defense

Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahhaha

— Tyrann Mathieu (@Mathieu_Era) September 20, 2021

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I mean I like his fire, and he is still playing at a high level. Yet we haven’t resigned him, do you start to see the problem?
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This defense is the scheme not the players. Jones only needs to be at DE when we face a passing team and kicked inside when teams run the ball. Gay needs to get back, tired of seeing Niemann and Sorensen
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Think it's a bit of both. The scheme is focused on having run stuffers - Nnadi, Pennell and Jones in the interior served that purpose, Clark to some limited degree set the edge. Moving Jones hasn't helped, Reed has not been a good signing and Nnadi has looked surprisingly bad while Clark looks like a corpse. Saunders is fine but is a downgrade it seems, though I still think he'll improve and be useful, and it's just not what Wharton should be used for.

So along the DL we've shifted players out of their best position, brought in inferior talent, AND seen player regression which might be temporary or not.

But it's not just the DL. Bolton looks like he was brought in to be a thumper - I'm pretty hopeful he'll get there but he's being asked to do way too much by the DL. He just isn't athletic enough to cover. I'm the same as you though, hopeful of Gay's impact, because the talent pool looks very shallow at LB otherwise.

It's also coverage. I actually like the look of Hughes and at this point I think Veach deserves credit for this pick up. Ward has looked awful and Sneed being asked to do more looks like he's struggling to me. Sorensen I won't bother discussing.

Basically the DL has to get better. I think it will at DT but at DE realistically it looks like we'll be patching holes until we bring in new players through trade or the next draft.
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When it's this bad I don't think it's fair to blame just the players or just the scheme. It's both. I tend to always blame players more. They the ones playing not Spags..
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It's not the scheme. Spags has 3 rings. Players are fucking up and are not living up to their contracts on the DL. Dan and Ben are a problem but no the biggest problem. DL has been shit and two of them are 100 mil guys.
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Spags has had more terrible defenses than good ones in his career.
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DL gets blown off the ball nearly every time. Did I also mention Hitchens got blocked out of running plays by a lanky 200 lb WR?

This is a players problem guys

The Chiefs LB/S/DE Make A Play Against The Run Challenge pic.twitter.com/rzbrokPVYM

— Hayden Winks (@HaydenWinks) September 21, 2021

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Sure is.
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The Dline isn't getting blown off the ball. I don't see that at all.

But good god, watch Hitchens on every snap.

This is exactly wtf i was talking about. He guessed wrong ALLLLL night. Bolton too.

Bolton and Hitchens got worked. We been talking Dline all week....that's wrong boys. Look at our LB's. They're out of position almost every goddamn play. Baltimore was running right at the holes they vacated.

They threw at them too.

That slant that Hollywood Brown took deep into Chiefs territory was Bolton biting hard on the PA and leaving his zone wide the fuck open for the easy slant and go.
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Yeah the Jones playing a lot at DE is not helping on the run. Agree 100%
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Unleash Mahomes and I could care less how many rushing yards the losing team gains. This is entirely a problem created by throttling the offense by insisting on running some predetermined percentage of the game, no matter how ineffective it is.
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This is ultimately the correct answer. We have given up rush yards to many teams and it hasn’t made much difference for years. We didn’t lose either Mahomes playoff game because the other team ran the ball. The Ravens also didn’t just become a running team and it took them four tries to beat Mahomes.

We lost this game because of a bad end of game play and a 1st and 25 for the Ravens two straight PASSES later being a big TD.
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