The Kansas City Chiefs are trying to do something no team has ever accomplished before: win three straight Super Bowls.
The rest of the NFL is trying to stop them.
These are the key elements of the Chiefs’ success that will once again play a role in their quest — and could provide clues as to how other teams can dethrone the NFL’s kings.
Other stories in this series: How Previous 3-peat Bids Failed | The genius of Steve Spagnuolo | What if Travis Kelce hits the wall? | Rookies who can lift KC
In the NFL quarterback community, it is not uncommon for one member to show respect to another.
But sometimes, like this week, the irony is great.
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was asked about his Baltimore Ravens counterpart, Lamar Jackson. Mahomes praised the reigning MVP’s athleticism, throwing ability and competitive nature.
“He wants to go out there and win and take it on his shoulders,” Mahomes said. “It’s not just about talent. It’s about, can you go out there every week and compete and find ways? When you don’t have your best stuff, your team doesn’t have your best stuff, you find ways to win football games.
“That’s what it really takes to be a great quarterback in this league.”
The praise was right and deserved. But Mahomes’ description of Jackson felt like something more.
An NFL quarterback who carries his team even when things go wrong? Patrick Mahomes might as well have been talking about himself.
The Chiefs have appeared in four of the last five Super Bowls, winning three, and they didn’t just have the most talented team or the best-coached one. They didn’t pay every star who helped win a Lombardi Trophy (hello Miami Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill and Tennessee Titans cornerback L’Jarius Sneed), and they didn’t just benefit from luck.
On the days when Mahomes and the Chiefs are at their best, yes, they’re unstoppable. But what’s driven and thwarted the rest of the NFL over the last five years is that the Chiefs continue to triumph, even in games and seasons where their shortcomings shine loud and clear.
So NFL teams looking to thwart the Chiefs’ triple-double are asking themselves: Is there a recipe for that kind of resilience-driven success? What can we learn from the Kansas City formula?
Yahoo Sports interviewed four executives, four coaches and five players from eight different teams to better understand how they think the Chiefs came to be.
The paradoxes that unfolded help explain why the Chiefs are so difficult to explain.
To change or not to change? That is the Chiefs’ answer
As 32 NFL teams attempt each year to do what 31 of them can’t, they will try to determine: Are we better off chasing consistency or constant evolution? Are we more likely to win by having clear schematic and personnel answers or by taking a risk?
The answers to those questions will only frustrate teams hoping to emulate the Chiefs.
More than a dozen training camp interviews painted a picture of a Kansas City team with a consistent leadership foundation but a dynamic strategy. The answer to the above questions: The Chiefs do both.
Their offense benefits from continuity, as Andy Reid and Mahomes enter their seventh year of marriage as play-callers and playmakers, Mahomes also having mastered chemistry with tight end Travis Kelce throughout that span. The Chiefs’ defense benefits from six plus years of Steve Spagnuolo’s leadership in an era when many Super Bowl-winning coordinators would have been long gone. Spagnuolo has designed and re-designed his roster around stalwart Trench Chris Jones.
And yet, despite those anchors, if you watch the Chiefs’ 2019 Super Bowl run, you’ll see a different vision than their 2023 Super Bowl run.
An offense that was once a strong offense leading a good but not great defense has turned into a suffocating defense leading a less dynamic offense.
The transformation reminds Cleveland Browns general manager Andrew Berry of another perennial contender.
“You saw this a lot with New England, during the Belichick days, how an organization can shift its identity around the coach and the quarterback,” Berry told Yahoo Sports. “What usually happens is people get to the Super Bowl and they’re like, ‘OK, this is just the formula. We’re going to keep doing the same thing even when the circumstances change.’
“That’s probably what impressed me the most: that organization really had two different styles of teams, or two different styles of rosters, but they have the main pillars.”
Mahomes is the primary tentpole on the field that makes the change possible, with Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski describing Mahomes as “scheme-agnostic.” Defenders lament Mahomes’ ability to turn every botched play into an equal or better outcome, especially when it comes to Kelce.
“It might be something that people think is crazy or off-script, but they practice it so much that it’s not really,” Chicago Bears cornerback Jaylon Johnson said. “Their script is off-script.”
Credit must also go to Reid, who models and encourages that creativity. Mahomes recently said that he knows that Reid, as one of the greatest coaches and play-callers of all time (Berry ventured that Reid is in the top four in every category), can be narrow-minded or strict in his coaching. He chooses not to be, instead tirelessly seeking the best structure to guide and liberate his players.
“Andy has had success with different QBs that are different shapes and sizes and come from different places,” said Los Angeles Rams general manager Les Snead. “He’s not a guy who says, ‘My scheme is a rectangle and I’ve drawn a circle. Circle has to become a rectangle.’
“He’s one of the best attacking minds in terms of creativity and keeping the defense off balance. He applies pressure to make the defenders cover a lot of different geometries on that football pitch.”
Can the Chiefs recipe be copied?
There is a Chiefs culture that players across the league both revere and hate.
It’s a culture of clutch playmaking and rising to the occasion; a culture of believing you’re never out, because over the past six years, the Chiefs rarely have been. Simply put, opponents believe that Chiefs winning leads to more winning.
“It’s really hard to beat them because they just don’t know how to lose,” Los Angeles Chargers running back JK Dobbins said. “Some teams know how to lose. They don’t know how to lose.”
Opponents often feel like they can hold the Chiefs for the better part of three quarters. But come the fourth quarter, Kansas City so often outshines the competition.
“There’s always that one play they can make in the blink of an eye,” Cincinnati Bengals offensive lineman Cody Ford said. “So when you get them, you don’t even think it’s over.”
“Their script is not according to the script.”Chicago Bears CB Jaylon Johnson
Johnson compares Mahomes to “standard quarterbacks,” who can be beaten by defenses by identifying and neutralizing their strengths. The problem with applying that strategy to Kansas City: Almost everything is Mahomes’ strength. So “you never really take it away,” the Bears cornerback said.
Such strength has allowed general manager Brett Veach to let go of some high-priced players and combine probably-good-always draft picks with a quarterback who can routinely make good players look great. Veach deserves credit for selecting Mahomes when nine teams passed on him, and the franchise’s leadership deserves credit for giving Mahomes a year to develop before he was expected to lead the team.
That plan, like the continuation of the Chiefs’ course, deserves praise for the way leadership has positioned itself around it, executives say.
It’s easy to assume that a generational talent like Mahomes would flourish even in his first year. But Snead has seen quarterbacks whose rookie years hampered their ability to capitalize on their talent.
“It seems like he could have done it,” Snead said. “But maybe because he has that rare ability to thrive off the grid, he might have relied on that too much as a rookie and that would have put him in a little bit of jeopardy or something.
“You never know how that will turn out over time.”
What the league does know is that the Chiefs’ recipe, however amorphous and paradoxical, has evolved over time into a great result.
Perhaps there’s no way to truly identify one ingredient that makes the difference. And without all the pieces, some NFL teams are wondering if they’d be better off not copying the Chiefs’ formula at all and instead discovering their own.
Meanwhile, they continue to try to thwart the seemingly unstoppable. Offenses try to overcome the Chiefs’ swarming defensive line, while defenses try to stop everything but Mahomes if they can’t stop him.
“It honestly doesn’t matter who they put out there, he’s going to run around and make plays around us,” Pittsburgh Steelers safety DeShon Elliott said. “Backyard football, but hey, it works for them. You’ve got to be able to minimize the big plays.
“Minimize the big plays and stop the run – then at least you have a chance.”
