A Rare NFL Pre-Season Game Take

Yesterday, the Kansas City Chiefs lost a pre-season game to the Tampa Buccaneers. Which doesn't sound good for the Chiefs.

What does that tell us about the Chiefs' prospects in the coming season? IMO, not much.

It was a one-point loss, with Harrison Butker missing on four points (a missed field goal and a missed extra point). Butker has become less consistently perfect in the last couple of years, but it's not like he's gone to hell in a hand-basket. He nailed a 69-yard field goal. Nothing resembling a blowout.

Both teams did play most of their starters for at least parts of the game, but Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes didn't play at all, and Bucs QB Baker Mayfield only played two drives. Backups played the rest of the game at QB.

Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who probably should have retired before the 2025 season, played and played pretty well, but I don't think we'll see him on the field a lot during the regular season. I consider his presence on the field yesterday to be more along the lines of reassurance and motivation for the new guys than an indicator that he's going to be a big part of the season.

The two big questions for the Chiefs this year are:

• Will Mahomes be really back, healthy, and at top of form himself? and
• Will his recovery from injury have thwarted his usually excellent skills at forming the rest of the team into a unit that he can make good use of before he has to make use of them for real?

I'm not confident that both of those things will be the case. It wasn't a minor injury, Mahomes is not just out of high school and able to bounce back the way a 19-year-old can, and when the Chiefs were really good for several years, it seemed to largely be because he and his teammates could literally read each others' minds to pull off crazy shit that normal teams couldn't.

I will not be surprised if the Chiefs don't make the playoffs this year. Even if Mahomes is in perfect form, they're definitely in a rebuilding phase. If he can't stay healthy, a different quarterback will have to not just rebuild, but use a different model for rebuilding.

On the other hand, losing by only one point to the Bucs because your kicker wasn't quite in the zone doesn't prove much either way.