Rashee Rice watched the ball go through his hands on fourth-and-4 from Kansas City’s 41-yard line, and with it went the Chiefs’ 2025 season and perhaps the final whimper of a once-great team.
On Sunday night, Kansas City watched its playoff hopes evaporate like a warm breath, losing 17–10 to the Texans. For Houston, that makes five consecutive wins and they’re likely onto the postseason in the wide-open AFC. For the Chiefs, they’re 6–7 and now face looming questions about what’s next with a franchise suddenly bursting with cracks.
In quiet reflection, general manager Brett Veach must know the truth: This won’t be an easy fix.
Kansas City is projected to be $42.7 million over the salary cap this offseason, better only than the Cowboys. Veach can reverse that issue with the releases of right tackle Jawaan Taylor, linebacker Drue Tranquill, corner Kristian Fulton and defensive end Mike Danna, saving $40 million against the cap. Then, with a restructure of Patrick Mahomes’s $78.2 million cap hit, Kansas City could find itself somewhere around $30 million to $40 million under the threshold.
Those cap savings are enough to be a minor player in free agency, but not enough to patch the myriad holes on the roster. The secondary is about to see corner Jaylen Watson and safety Bryan Cook hit the market, both multi-year starters. Both either need an extension or to be replaced. In the front seven, the only players worth building around are All-Pro defensive tackle Chris Jones and edge rusher George Karlaftis.
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Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, one of the best to ever don a headset, has to relentlessly blitz in order to get pressure while also playing veterans such as Drue Tranquill and safety Mike Edwards. Kansas City’s defense is slow, old and unathletic. The issues must be addressed at every level, which will be no easy feat. This is especially true coming off a spring in which Nick Bolton, a linebacker good against the run and awful in pass coverage, was signed to a $45 million deal over three years.
Offensively, it’s a question of coaching and players. While Mahomes had his second game this season with a completion rate below 50%, something never done before in his career, he’s the least of Kansas City’s problems. All year, a pass-catching stable including Rice, Xavier Worthy, Marquise Brown and Travis Kelce has struggled mightily to beat man coverage and catch the ball.
On Sunday night, Chiefs pass catchers combined for six dropped passes, the most in the Mahomes era. Even with a much-improved offensive line primarily due to first-round left tackle Josh Simmons, Kansas City’s offense has gone through lengthy lulls.
Matt Nagy’s third season of his second stint as the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator hasn’t lived up to his previous years in charge. / Mark Konezny-Imagn Images
On the surface, the numbers are good. Coming into Sunday, the offense ranked fourth in yards and ninth in points per game, but watching Kansas City tells a different story.
Four times this year, the Chiefs have lost while taking 10-plus penalties. In Week 2, Travis Kelce turned a would-be go-ahead touchdown into a dropped pass and interception at the goal line in a 20–17 defeat to the Eagles. Against the Jaguars, Kansas City watched Mahomes throw a 99-yard pick-six to Devin Lloyd in a 31–28 loss.
In Buffalo, the Chiefs failed to score a touchdown on first-and-goal from the 1-yard line in a 28–21 debacle. The following game, Mahomes & Co. threw an interception at the goal line and twice failed to put up points with the score 19–16 and then tied at 19 in the fourth quarter before losing 22–19 to the Broncos. Against the Cowboys, the offense didn’t score a point in the second or third quarters, falling 31–28. And against Houston, the Chiefs scored 10 points while Mahomes threw three interceptions.
While the offense desperately needs a dynamic back (Kansas City has two non-Mahomes rushes of 20 yards all year), the trio of Rice, Kelce and Worthy is superb. The line is a quality group. Which points to the coaching and a Hall of Fame coach at that.
Andy Reid has forgotten more about football than most coaches will know in a dozen lifetimes. And yet throughout the year, the metrics have shown Kansas City should run from under center as compared to the shotgun. Repeatedly, the Chiefs have eschewed those numbers to fit Reid’s proclivity to run Kareem Hunt and Isiah Pacheco from a standstill position. The result has been a team with no explosion.
None of that’s to suggest the Chiefs should lose their minds and move on from Reid. He’s a future first-ballot Hall of Fame coach. But they should consider moving on from Matt Nagy, who in his most-recent stint as the offensive coordinator has watched the team slowly morph from an offensive juggernaut to a pedestrian unit while fielding the best player on earth at the sport’s paramount position.
And if Nagy goes, Reid shouldn’t hire from within. He shouldn’t bring back Mike Kafka from the Giants or Doug Pederson, formerly of the Eagles and Jaguars. Both worked on Kansas City’s staff under Reid and have league-wide respect. Instead, Reid should be looking for someone who can provide outside ideas, refreshing a scheme that has become stale.
In 2022, the Chiefs had Kelce at his apex but little else in terms of high-end playmakers. Pacheco and Jerick McKinnon were the running backs. The receivers were JuJu Smith-Schuster, Justin Watson and Marquez Valdes-Scantling. With Eric Bieniemy as coordinator, Mahomes threw for 5,250 yards and won NFL MVP for an eventual champion while scoring a league-high 29.2 points per game.
Since, despite the infusion of Rice and Worthy, the offense has ranked 15th in points each of the past two years and is trending that way once more.
All that said, Veach faces a cold reality: The Chiefs only have six draft picks in 2026 and limited cap space. They need to prepare for life without Kelce, whether that’s next season or the one after. The GM also must make decisions on whether to pay Rice and/or All-Pro corner Trent McDuffie, both of whom are slated for free agency after the ’26 season.
To that end, Veach should be thinking about what he did after 2021, when the Chiefs lost to the Bengals in the AFC title game. That offseason, he stunned the football world by trading All-Pro receiver Tyreek Hill, getting five picks in return. Neither Rice nor McDuffie will command that sort of return, but McDuffie could land a pair of top-100 choices. If it’s that or paying $30 million to a player who has vacillated between being in the slot and on the boundary, perhaps that’s the smart move.
Regardless, Veach has a long road ahead. Nothing about the coming months for the Chiefs will be easy.
But at the moment, football’s version of Rome has fallen. Kansas City is vanquished. And the Chiefs are left to wonder what happened and what has gone so wrong.
Much like the thought assuredly going through Rice’s head, as the ball went through his hands.
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