This was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the Kansas City Chiefs. A retooling year. A year for them to risk taking a small step backward in exchange for a larger step forward in the future. They traded away Tyreek Hill, one of the best wide receivers in the NFL, for draft picks and salary cap relief. They drafted 10 rookies and ended up starting six of them regularly.
And in the end, none of it mattered. The final step the Chiefs took this season was onto the winner’s podium after the Super Bowl. They went 14-3 during the regular season, never trailed throughout the AFC’s side of the playoffs, and then after falling behind by 10 points in the Super Bowl, scored 24 points in the second half to win their second title in four years. And they won even though the best football player on the planet suffered a high ankle sprain 13 minutes into their postseason. Once again, the Chiefs are world champions. And once again, they are the presumptive favorites to win next year’s Super Bowl.
From the moment Patrick Mahomes took the field as their starting quarterback—now five full seasons ago—the Chiefs have been the most dominant team in the NFL. They have been the mountain that every other team must climb, the final boss that every title contender must vanquish. They have been the one who knocks. That doesn’t mean they have been champions every year, because that is not the way sports work. But it has required a Herculean effort to defeat them, either in the Super Bowl or in an overtime struggle in the AFC championship game. Only three teams have managed to accomplish the task in five years.
And now, after they won their second Vince Lombardi Trophy in four seasons, we can finally broach a subject that has felt weirdly, gloriously inevitable almost from the early weeks of the 2018 season. We can finally ask: Are the Chiefs a dynasty?
“Dynasty” is one of those sports words, like “choke” or “momentum,” that is functionally useless because no one can agree on an exact definition. For some, a dynasty must include, as a bare minimum, three championships over a condensed time frame. That’s an incredibly—almost unreasonably—hard feat to accomplish.
The Green Bay Packers inaugurated the modern era of the NFL by winning five titles in seven years, from 1961 to 1967—but only two Super Bowls, because the Super Bowl didn’t exist (and therefore the Packers never had to play the AFL champion) for their first three. In the entire Super Bowl era, just four teams have ever won three Super Bowls in a five-year span: The 1974-79 Pittsburgh Steelers (who won four in six), the 1992-95 Dallas Cowboys, the 2001-05 New England Patriots, and the 2014-18 Patriots. Even the iconic San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s and 1990s never won three titles in five years. (They won three in six. No other team has ever won three Super Bowls in a span of less than eight years.)
But if your definition of “dynasty” is less rigidly adherent to rings alone as a marker of domination, there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the Chiefs, who have just completed the most dominant five-year stretch of any team that didn’t win three titles in that span.
Let’s start with a basic question. Since the start of the 2018 season, the Chiefs have gone 64-18. How many NFL teams have won more games within five years? Just two:
Most Regular-Season Wins in Five Years, NFL History
(There are a lot of overlapping Patriots years that have been pared out of respect for everyone else.)
Of course, one of those teams was the Peyton Manning Colts, who even the most liberal dynasty definer would struggle to put in that category: They won just one title, and while they made (and lost) one other Super Bowl in that span, they lost their first playoff game in each of the other three seasons. Dynasties require postseason excellence, and a 6-4 playoff record hardly qualifies.
The 2018-22 Chiefs, you may have deduced, did not go 6-4 in the playoffs. In Mahomes’s first year as a starter, they won their first game before losing to the Patriots in the AFC championship game, which is notable because it is the only time that Mahomes has not won multiple playoff games in a season. Only two teams in NFL history have ever won multiple playoff games in four straight seasons: the 2019-22 Chiefs and the 1990-93 Buffalo Bills, who famously lost their final postseason game—the Super Bowl—all four years.
The Patrick Mahomes Chiefs are 11-3 in the postseason, which makes them one of the winningest postseason NFL teams in a five-year span as well:
Most Postseason Wins in Five Years, NFL History
Put those two lists together, and in all of NFL history, just one team has won more games—regular season and postseason combined—within five years than these Chiefs:
Most Total Wins in Five Years, NFL History
And finally, if we give teams credit for “dynasty points”—four points for a season in which they win the Super Bowl, two points for a season in which they lose the Super Bowl, and one point for a season in which they lose in their conference championship game—here are the teams with the most “dynasty points” in a five-year span:
The Dynasty Points Leaderboard
By any non–Super Bowl–winning measure of a team’s dominance, the 2018-22 Chiefs rank among the five best NFL teams of the Super Bowl era. Of all the teams that have won two titles in a five-year span, only the Chiefs and the 1971-73 Dolphins also lost a Super Bowl during that stretch. And while the Dolphins failed to win a playoff game in either 1970 or 1974 (and didn’t make the playoffs in any other year from 1966 to 1977), the Chiefs reached the AFC title game in both years that they failed to reach the Super Bowl. So the Chiefs have an airtight case of being the most dynastic team of the Super Bowl era that did not win three titles in five years—which puts them no lower than fifth on the list of most dynasty-like teams since the AFL-NFL merger.
Beyond all that data, though, a dynasty typically has special vibes—an iconic group of people at the core of its success whose brilliance spans the entire run.
The Chiefs? They have Mahomes and Andy Reid, who both, by the time they retire, could rank among the two best ever to do their respective jobs. Then there’s Travis Kelce, who’s top two all time at the tight end position and I will argue he isn’t second: Kelce already has the statistical case for being the greatest tight end of all time, and he is still playing at peak efficiency. Rob Gronkowski, who like Kelce is 33 years old, might have been slightly better at his peak, but struggled to stay healthy and has retired—twice. Kelce hasn’t missed a game due to injury in the past nine years. Reid, Mahomes, and Kelce form an iconic trio to rank up there with Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, Bill Walsh and Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, and Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and [insert a random Patriot here].
Now, Mahomes was asked about the D-word after the Super Bowl, and he downplayed the Chiefs’ place in history to this point, saying: “I’m not going to say dynasty yet.” But the most important word in that sentence is the last one. What matters now isn’t what the Chiefs may or may not have been: It’s what they may still yet become.
The biggest reason the Chiefs have been able to sustain this run so far is Mahomes, and he’s also the reason their outlook is so promising. I don’t know what else there is to say about him. When, on the final drive of the Super Bowl, Mahomes outraced two Eagles pursuers on an injured ankle for a 26-yard gain (the Chiefs’ biggest play from scrimmage in the entire game), it brought to mind the popular Twitter joke about his speed: “How fast is Patrick Mahomes? As fast as he needs to be to be faster than whoever is chasing him.” (Or as Mahomes himself once put it: “They should’ve had somebody chasing me on my 40.”) But that run served as a metaphor for Mahomes’s entire career. How good is Patrick Mahomes? As good as he needs to be to be better than whoever you’re comparing him to.
We’ve been calling Mahomes the GOAT in the making for more than two years around here, and he just keeps improving. He is now playing at a level that few quarterbacks have ever contemplated, let alone matched. He is the science and the art. He has the numbers and the narrative. This season, he led the NFL in passing yards and was the Super Bowl MVP, which has never happened before. His statistics are so outrageous that our models struggle to contain him: Among the analyst community he’s known as Top-Right-Corner Mahomes because he’s the outlier in almost every data set, even wins. He has the highest regular-season winning percentage (.800) in NFL history (minimum 75 starts) and the highest postseason winning percentage (.786) in NFL history (minimum 12 starts).
He performs at his best when his team is behind: His .583 winning percentage in games where his team was losing by double digits at some point is 200 points higher than any other QB. And when his team is hurt: In the biggest grudge game of his career—this year’s AFC championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals, who dealt him a stinging defeat in the same game the year before—he made it work despite injuries to the wide receiver corps that left rookie Skyy Moore and practice squad veteran Marcus Kemp as two of his primary targets for most of the second half.
He’s just different. And best of all, he is just 27 years old. At some positions, 27 might already be on the downslope of your career. Quarterback is not one of those positions.
To get an idea of what the age curve for quarterbacks looks like, we can use a statistic from Pro Football Reference known as approximate value, which attempts to put an, um, approximate value on every player’s season. As a method for determining “Who had a better season, Christian McCaffrey or Micah Parsons?” it is an imperfect tool. But for answering general questions like “At what age do most quarterbacks peak?” it is very useful.
NFL QBs With Approximate Value of 12 or More, 1983-2022
While most good quarterbacks are at their best from ages 25 to 29—a peak that Mahomes is squarely in the middle of—they have an extremely gentle decline through their age-34 season, at which point the number of top-tier quarterbacks by average value drops in half every two years. And this is a random assortment of good quarterbacks, not necessarily elite, let alone historic. From this data we can conservatively expect Mahomes to play at near-GOAT levels for at least another seven seasons, and be productive for another half decade after that. If the career arcs of recent all-time greats like Brady and Aaron Rodgers, who won back-to-back MVPs at age 37 and 38, are any indication, with an obsessive work ethic and good fortune with his health, Mahomes could be a Super Bowl–caliber quarterback until his 40th birthday, if not beyond.
And really … isn’t that enough? If Mahomes continues to play at this level for another seven years or more, does anyone want to assume that he won’t win another title? That he won’t win multiple titles? That alone makes any controversy over whether it’s premature to call the Chiefs a dynasty academic. As Mahomes himself said Sunday night: “We’re not done.”
The Chiefs have already managed the biggest salary cap challenge of the Patrick Mahomes era: They won a Super Bowl when he was on his rookie contract, and have now won a Super Bowl with Mahomes counting for more than $35 million against their cap. His cap hit is likely to increase over the remaining nine (!) years on his deal, but at a rate commensurate with the increase in the salary cap itself. They won the Super Bowl with Mahomes taking up 17 percent of their cap space—an unprecedented feat under modern salary cap rules—and they are well-positioned to make sure that Mahomes can stay in that range for the life of his deal. It will help the Chiefs that Mahomes’s contract has a built-in mechanism that allows the Chiefs to convert roster bonuses into signing bonuses each season, which has the effect of pushing a portion of his cap hit well into the future. The Chiefs didn’t use this option in 2022—it turns out they didn’t need to!—but have the flexibility to do so at any time.
Which is important, because the Chiefs are not Mahomes alone. They are not even Mahomes, Reid, and Kelce alone. The Chiefs are, top to bottom, a well-oiled, precision-tuned, exquisitely crafted machine humming on all cylinders right now. It’s not simply that they traded away Hill last offseason, got cheaper and younger across the roster, and somehow got better. It’s that it was the second straight offseason in which GM Brett Veach completely overhauled a critical part of his team’s offense and pushed all the right buttons in doing so.
Two years ago, after the Chiefs lost Super Bowl LV because Mahomes was running for his life the entire game behind an injury-ravaged offensive line, Veach rebuilt the line in a single offseason. He spent in free agency, making Joe Thuney the highest-paid left guard in the game. He made a controversial trade, acquiring Orlando Brown Jr. from the Ravens for essentially a first-round draft pick. And then he struck oil in the draft—twice—landing center Creed Humphrey in the second round and right guard Trey Smith in the sixth. Brown made the Pro Bowl each of the past two years, Humphrey and Smith both made the NFL All-Rookie Team in 2021, and Thuney and Humphrey were both second-team All-Pros this year. The one lineman held over from the 2020 team, Andrew Wylie, was asked to move from guard to right tackle—a more difficult and more critical position to play—and over the past two seasons has fended off all challengers and established himself as a solid-average starter there.
In the Super Bowl, against a Philadelphia Eagles pass rush that had the highest sack rate (11.2 percent) of any team since 2000, the Chiefs O-line was flawless. They did not allow a sack, and opened up so many holes that the team averaged 6.1 yards per rushing attempt.
Then there is the draft, which is the reason the Hill trade worked as spectacularly as it has. The 2022 Chiefs draft may well be the fulcrum upon which the franchise has pivoted from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the Mahomes era. They drafted 10 players, and nine of them were on the active roster for the Super Bowl. Both of their first-round picks (Trent McDuffie and George Karlaftis) started … and so did two seventh-round picks, cornerback Jaylen Watson and running back Isiah Pacheco. Skyy Moore caught a touchdown on Sunday night. Safety Bryan Cook, linebacker Leo Chenal, and cornerback Joshua Williams all played important snaps. For a team to win the Super Bowl while relying so heavily on rookie talent is rare, and it’s a strong positive indicator for the future as those first-year players develop while continuing to make a small imprint on the salary cap.
The Chiefs’ success in getting an immediate boost from the draft wasn’t a fluke, as they have done an admirable job of finding talent in each of their past four drafts. Of the 28 players selected the past four years, 25 of them played for the Chiefs this season, including at least one starter in each draft that was picked after the first round. In each of the past three drafts they found a starter on Day 3: CB L’Jarius Sneed in the fourth round in 2020, Smith in the sixth round in 2021, and Pacheco and Watson in the seventh round in 2022. Given how much value the Chiefs have gotten out of the draft in recent years, it’s even more promising that they were able to win the Super Bowl without cashing out any future picks: They have their full allotment for 2023, along with an extra fourth-rounder and seventh-rounder.
The Chiefs have the best player in the sport, they do a great job of finding new talent to surround him with, and to top it off, they have a stable of coaches who have a proven track record of excellence when it comes to developing that talent, putting them in the best position to win. Reid is a legend whose second title vaults him in the discussion among the top five coaches of all time, but the coaches who work underneath him are integral to that success. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo is the only coordinator in NFL history to win a Super Bowl with two different organizations; offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy has presided over the league’s highest-flying offense for five years, and his inability to land a head-coaching job has become more infuriating every year. His breakdown of the Eagles helped find the flaw in their defense that led to the Chiefs calling corn dog for a wide-open touchdown pass—twice!—in the fourth quarter.
The NFL is a sport of attrition, and to stay static is to court doom. The Chiefs will face challenges over the next few years, and they will need to continue to stay ahead of them. Reid will not coach forever. There was chatter on Super Bowl Sunday that he might retire after the game, and while he quashed those rumors afterward, it is telling that his future is in any sort of doubt at all. Kelce is 33 years old, and managing what the Chiefs hope will be a slow and graceful decline will be critical. They have some crucial decisions to make this offseason, including what to do with Brown, who is a free agent, and whether to offer Chris Jones, who was a finalist this year for Defensive Player of the Year, a cap-busting contract extension. But so far this front office has been able to find a balance between the importance of holding on to talented players and the continuous need for renewal that is required to keep this incipient dynasty humming. Only 11 of the 53 players on the roster for Super Bowl LIV were still on the roster for Super Bowl LVII. Of the 22 men who started when the Chiefs won their Super Bowl three years ago, only five—Mahomes, Kelce, Jones, Frank Clark, and Derrick Nnadi—suited up Sunday night. The roster may change, but so long as the people shaping that roster remain in charge, and so long as Mahomes remains at the center of it all, I have every confidence that the winning will continue.
So put whatever label you want on the Chiefs. Dynasty, future dynasty, still uncertain. What you can’t deny is that they are champions of the world, that it wasn’t their first time, and that it probably won’t be their last. They’re not done. They may, in fact, just be getting started.