The 1972 Dolphins will have to wait. With their narrow, 22-19 win over the Denver Broncos, the Kansas City Chiefs remain undefeated – a perfect 10-0 and a full two games over the rest of the league. They look as close to unstoppable as they’ve ever been, coming up strong in the clutch over and over. It’s a far cry from their opponents in last year’s Super Bowl, as the Philadelphia Eagles lost another close game Sunday night, dropping to 2-8 and putting Nick Sirianni’s future in serious jeopardy…
…What? That’s not how you remember last week going or, indeed, the season as a whole so far? You know, with all the weird cable coverage shenanigans going on this year, it’s possible something’s wrong on my end, let me check all my various settings here…
Oh! Of course, my mistake. I’ve accidentally tuned into the universe where all the results of one-score games were flipped the other way around. An easy mistake to make, of course, silly me.
The Chiefs are, somewhat amazingly, 0-5 in one-score games this season – every single loss has been by eight points or fewer. This presumably comes as quite a shock to Chiefs fans who have insisted for years that the Chiefs have the ability to kick things into gear whenever necessary to win a game. They came into 2025 on a 17-game winning streak in games decided by eight or fewer points, stretching all the way back to Christmas of 2023. This included a stretch of seven consecutive games featuring a one-score win, tying the NFL record held by, among others… the 2020 Chiefs. Coming out on top in close games hasn’t just been a trend in Kansas City; it’s been part of their entire identity.
With that gone, the Chiefs are floundering, finding themselves currently ninth in the AFC and the subject of roughly ten thousand thinkpieces about where the Dynasty Is Over. “The aura is gone,” Damien Woody insists, saying that the Chiefs can’t finish anymore and that they’re not scaring anyone. CBS starts an article with “every dynasty must eventually come to an end,” saying that the Chiefs are facing a slew of issues that all adds up to them being unable to finish games. It’s a never-ending drumbeat of “what’s wrong with the Chiefs!” being played over and over and over again. If everyone’s saying it, it must be true, yes?
The 2025 Chiefs have a 22.9% DVOA. Last year (before the Week 18 Broncos game where the backups got shellacked), they were at 21.4%. Their defensive DVOA has dipped a little, going from -6.6% to -2.7%, but that’s been offset by their offensive DVOA jumping from 10.8% to 22.0%. Their passing attack, in particular has been much healthier – a refined role for Travis Kelce has him leading all tight ends in DYAR, and Patrick Mahomes is on pace for his highest passing DVOA since 2022 in part thanks to greater availability from his top receivers and superior pass protection. Everywhere else, they’re basically equal to where they were a year ago, when they were squeaking through games by the grace of blocked field goals and botched snaps.
But surely, if they’re struggling with finishing, they’re worse in the fourth quarter, right? Again, no. In the fourth quarters and overtime, Kansas City has the third-best offensive DVOA at 20.0%, and the fifth-best defensive DVOA at -29.8%. Last year? They were at 20.0% on offense and -19.3% on defense. So if anything, they’ve been performing better when closing out games than last season. Much has been made about Mahomes completing just 45% of his passes when tied or trailing in the fourth quarter this season, but while that’s true, he’s still 12th with a 16.1% DVOA in those situations – and that’s before you start factoring in things like having the ball with less than 20 seconds left against Jacksonville and Buffalo and trying to make miracle deep shots happen to somehow pull a win out of his hat.
The Chiefs have scored on 50% of their fourth-quarter drives when tied or trailing, tied for the eighth-best rate in the league. They’ve also only allowed three touchdowns in the fourth quarter or overtime of one-score games (though they have also allowed their opponents to kick four field goals). This is not a team that crumbles in the clutch!
So, why are they 0-5? Well, one-score games are volatile. It’s not really fair to call these unlucky losses, as if the teams involved had no agency whatsoever, of course. Against Jacksonville, for instance, the Chiefs kicked the ball out of bounds, let Trevor Lawrence convert third-and-7 on a bomb to Brian Thomas Jr., committed pass interference on thrd-and-13, and then couldn’t stop Lawrence from scoring on a play where he slipped and fell on the snap. A better defensive play on basically any of those snaps likely flips the result there, and we’re talking about the 6-4 Chiefs instead. But that’s the point – these are games where if someone was a step slower or a hair faster, you flip the result without really affecting how well either team played.
KANSAS CITY, MO – DECEMBER 15: Kansas City Chiefs defensive end Chris Jones (95) in the second quarter of an AFC West game between the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs on December 15, 2019 at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, MO. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire)
Results in one-score games aren’t random — there’s a 0.76 correlation between a team’s overall record and their one-score game record over the past 10 years. This is in part because not all one-score games are made equal, with Kansas City’s losses to the Jaguars and Eagles being much closer contests than the Bills or Chargers losses, no matter what the scoreboard ended up saying. Over a long enough period of time, a team’s results in one-score games tends to approach their overall record. It’s just that one season really isn’t enough for those tight calls and missed opportunities to even out. The Chiefs probably “deserve” to have one or two wins in their five one-score games, but, well, them’s the breaks in a small sample size. There’s no reason to expect the Chiefs will continue to underperform in one-score games moving forwards, just like there was no reason to expect them to continue to win those games last season. The Chiefs will win football games because they are a good football team; they’re neither inexplicably blessed nor unfairly cursed.
But these losses take their toll. Only six Super Bowl winners have had a losing record in one-score games. The worst overall record belongs to the 1999 Rams at 0-3, and the most losses belong to the 2010 Packers, who finished 4-6 in one score games. It’s not that teams with losing records in coin-flip games are just bad at winning close games, but the NFL season is short enough that a couple bad bounces dramatically shift your odds. Bye weeks become first-round matchups and road trips in the conference championship. Division winners become Wild Card contenders. And Wild Card games become good tee times in Cabo in January. It’s not that the Chiefs are bad in one-score games, it’s that they’ve been bad in one-score games, and that’s put them in a hole that’s tough to overcome. Kansas City now needs to go 5-2 to have a better than 50% chance to make the playoffs, and they’ll probably lose the division for the first time since 2015 even if they run the table the rest of the way. They’ve locked themselves in to the hard road from here on out.
But while we’ve been focusing on the Chiefs, they’re not the only ones with strange, season-warping results in close games. Let’s run a couple thought experiments, shall we?
Witching Hour Universe
Where losses become wins…
We know that not all one-score games are made equal – some games become one-score losses thanks to garbage time points and so on and so forth. But let’s ignore that for the moment, and go back to the universe from the opening paragraph. What if we flipped the result of every one-score game so far this season? We’re trying to make the wildest standings we can get with minimal actual change to a team’s actual quality, and it’s amazing how different the storylines would be…
The 10-0 Chiefs would obviously be on top of every power ranking in the world, with their 0-5 record in real life flipping to an unimpeachable 5-0 here. But they’d be far from the only topic dominating the airwaves.
PHILADELPHIA, PA – OCTOBER 30: Philadelphia Eagles Wide Receiver A.J. Brown (11) carries the ball in the fourth quarter during the game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles on October 30, 2022 at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, PA. (Photo by Kyle Ross/Icon Sportswire)
Nick Sirianni is surely toast, as the Eagles limp to a 2-8 record thanks to a 1-7 record in one-score games here in the Witching Hour Universe. You think the A.J. Brown drama is bad now? Imagine how toxic things would be if Philly opened up with an 0-4 start and had just lost back-to-back prime-time games where their offensive DVOA has failed to hit double digits. WIP callers would be melting down weekly on the air waves, and Nayrb Selwonk over at NTF would be trying to explain that no, the Eagles offense isn’t as bad as their record would indicate, even in what’s clearly a lost season.
The top of the AFC looks a bit different, too. Daniel Jones and the Colts are still a story – they’ve been beating teams up more often than not and have a fairly normal 3-2 record in one-score games in our universe, so they just drop one game here. The Patriots drop a little further, but doesn’t 6-5 seem more fitting for the way their defense has been playing than their 9-2 record in real life? But Bo Nix’s late game heroics come up short, wasting great performances by Denver’s defense and flipping their 7-2 record in one-score games in our world to 2-7 in the Witching Hour universe; they’re well out of the playoff race and don’t seem positioned to make any real run at anything.
Monday’s matchup looks terrible here. Mac Jones’ 2-6 record has killed the 49ers’ season, while Bryce Young and the Kardiac Kats have flatlined, going 1-5 in their one-score games and putting Carolina in a great position to get the No. 1 overall pick. The Bears are also 1-5 in their one-score games in this universe, surrendering the NFC North lead to the Witching Hour Packers instead – their tie with Dallas becomes, well, a tie. Cleveland and Dallas find themselves sitting atop rather terrible divisions, the Texans roared out to a 6-0 start and are treading water as they wait for C.J. Stroud to return, Atlanta is trying to figure out how to maintain a playoff spot with Michael Penix Jr. out for the year, Mike McDaniel’s job is saved with the Dolphins in the thick of the Wild Card hunt – it’s a strange universe indeed.
Oh, and the Seahawks and Rams are still really successful, and the Titans are still a disaster. Sometimes, your record really isn’t the result of luck at all.
PGWE Universe
He writes not that you won or lost, but how you play the game.
Not all one-score games are equal, and perhaps we shouldn’t treat them as such.
We have a stat called Post-Game Win Expectancy (PGWE), which estimates how likely a team was to win a given game based on how they performed – their VOAs for the game, the number of plays they ran, penalties against them, and so forth. For instance, it gave Kansas City a 31.6% chance of beating Denver last week, seeing it as a competitive game that Denver deservedly managed to bring home. Yet the cruel reality of the NFL standings is that either the Broncos or Chiefs were going to get rewarded a full win and the other team an entire loss, no matter how close the game actually was.
Well, who needs a scoreboard when you have advanced stats, anyway? PGWE .316 says that Denver did not kick Kansas City’s ass, so let’s give the Chiefs .316 wins and the Broncos .684 wins for Sunday’s effort. And, furthermore, let’s go out and do that for every single game this season, ranging from Seattle’s .9999 wins for clobbering the Saints 44-13 back in September to Buffalo’s .0295 wins for slipping past Baltimore on the SNF opener in Week 1. Here’s the playoff race in that universe. (FTN subscribers can see all the PGWE results by downloading the Premium Splits workbook from the DVOA Downloads page.)
AFC:
1. Colts (7.3-2.7)
2. Broncos (7.2-3.8)
3. Bills (6.5-3.5)
4. Ravens (5.9-4.1)
5. Chiefs (6.5-3.5)
6. Patriots (6.9-4.1)
7. Chargers (6.7-4.3)
In the Hunt: Texans (5.7-4.3)
NFC:
1. Rams (9.1-0.9)
2. Packers (6.9-3.1)
3. Eagles (6.2-3.8)
4. Buccaneers (5.3-4.7)
5. Seahawks (8.5-1.5)
6. Lions (6.2-3.8)
7. 49ers (5.7-5.3)
In the Hunt: Falcons (5.2-4.8), Cowboys (4.9-5.1), Bears (4.9-5.1), Cardinals (4.4-5.6)
This is a far less dramatic swing, but also feels more correct based on what we’ve seen on the field. No, the Chiefs shouldn’t be the undefeated monsters of the league with all their one-score games, but the top Wild Card slot seems more fitting for how they’ve played than sitting outside looking in. The Eagles, Broncos and Patriots aren’t quite as good as their records may indicate, but they’re still comfortably sitting in slightly reduced playoff position. The top two teams in DVOA sit head and shoulders above everyone else – the Rams have at least a 91.7% PGWE in every game except for the Seahawks matchup last week, while Seattle’s only game below a 50% PGWE was the 49ers loss in Week 1. This feels about right, and you would expect the standings in the real world to kind of verge towards this as the year goes on.
Oh, and the Titans would be dead last with 0.3 wins, a full two games below everyone else Because sometimes, you don’t need advanced stats to tell you a team is bad.
