KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The NFL provided a sneak-peek at the Chiefs’ schedule before the arrival of the full entrée later Wednesday, and out of the gate, it’s an AFC championship game rematch.
And then comes a rematch of the two AFC title games before that.
The Baltimore Ravens, the team the Chiefs beat in January to advance to Super Bowl LVIII, are headed to GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium for what the NFL dubs its Kickoff Game. The Cincinnati Bengals, who split the previous two AFC championship games with the Chiefs, will arrive in Kansas City 10 days later.
A pretty brutal start for the two-time defending Super Bowl champs, you could say.
But let me add a different adjective to the conversation: Advantageous.
Potentially.
We already knew whom the Chiefs would play in the 2024 regular season, so a schedule release day that the league has turned into Christmas morning is about the order of the gifts — not the gifts themselves. You could, in that case, argue it has limited relevance.
But the Chiefs could benefit from the most difficult of opponents to open their season.
Why? Same way it unfolded a year ago.
It’s not happenstance that the NFL spanned nearly two decades between its last repeat champion (the ‘03-04 Patriots) and its current one, the Chiefs.
Sure, it’s hard to win in the NFL. But it’s not as though we’re asking the same team to win some draft lottery in back-to-back years. These are good teams. The best, theoretically.
So why did it take 19 years before one of the best teams reproduced it all over again the following year?
Allow me to offer a theory, a partial even if not complete explanation, that’s applicable to the Chiefs. There are 31 teams that enter an offseason and, in turn, the ensuing regular season, knowing they have to be better than they were the year before. There is one team, by contrast, that knows it was good enough. It’s only natural the latter breeds contentment.
All of three hours into last season, that one team received the lesson that it, too, would need to be better. The Lions beat the Chiefs, 21-20, in the 2023 Kickoff Game, and it wasn’t merely because the Chiefs were missing All-Pro defensive tackle Chris Jones.
The Lions won because they shut down the Chiefs’ offense — with some help from the Chiefs themselves, which is part of the relevance here — not took advantage of an undermanned defense.
