A decade of January football ends in December. The Kansas City Chiefs’ playoff miss signals a shift in the AFC West power balance.
Kansas City thought of January football as a right, not a privilege, for ten years. Every winter, the Chiefs came, brought little, and stayed late. Arrowhead became a place to live for a season. Patrick Mahomes was going to happen. Andy Reid would never die. The rest of the AFC was supposed to change in response.
Sunday night disrupted that arrangement.
Mahomes’ late-game scramble, the awkward chase-down by Da’Shawn Hand, and the slow walk to the locker room with a towel draped over his head felt less like an injury update and more like a visual metaphor. The Chargers finished the job moments later, intercepting Gardner Minshew and officially escorting Kansas City out of the playoff picture. Final score: Chargers 16, Chiefs 13. End of an era? Not quite. End of assumption? Absolutely.
For Raiders fans, this was not a tragedy. It was confirmation…
Kansas City did not miss the postseason because Mahomes suddenly forgot how to play quarterback or because the league finally “figured him out.” The Chiefs missed the postseason because the margins they once owned no longer belong exclusively to them. Last year, they went 11-0 in one-score games, a statistical flex bordering on parody. This season, those same coin flips landed the other way seven times. That is not bad luck. That is regression with a sense of humor.
The explanation reads like a checklist of small failures. Late defensive stops did not materialize. Harrison Butker missed a career-high eight field goals. Drives stalled. Execution wavered. The Chiefs became an excellent team that kept asking to be great, and the answer kept coming back as “not tonight.”
Even Mahomes, still brilliant and still dangerous, was forced into improvisation more often than dominance. On Sunday, that improvisation ended with an MRI pending and a season ending, two minutes shy of another attempted miracle.
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Kansas City entered 2025 hoping to do something no franchise has ever done: reach a fourth straight Super Bowl. Instead, it joins the rest of the AFC on the couch, watching January football like everyone else. The streak of 10 consecutive playoff appearances is over. Dynasties, it turns out, are not permanent structures. They are leases.
There is a lot of spite for Raider Nation, but this isn’t about that. It’s all about chance. The Chiefs are not automatic anymore. The division is no longer pre-decided. The margins Kansas City once owned are now available to anyone disciplined enough to claim them.
The throne is not empty. But it is no longer untouchable.
*Top Photo: Ramble Illustration/Getty Images