Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: The Kansas City Chiefs were largely outplayed in a game they still managed to win this season. In last week’s AFC divisional-round game, the Houston Texans gained more total yards than the Chiefs, had more explosive plays, and were better on third downs. They did not turn the ball over once. And yet, somehow, some way, Kansas City, as it always seems to do, came away with a nine-point win.
While the Chiefs had their moments—tight end Travis Kelce had his first game with more than 100 receiving yards all season, and the Kansas City defense sacked Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud eight times for a loss of 58 yards—Houston did seem befallen by a number of suspicious circumstances, some outside its control. The Texans were penalized eight times for 82 yards, far more than Kansas City, including some very bad flags for questionable hits on quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The Texans also missed an extra point and had a 35-yard field goal—a gimme of a kick—blocked.
It was almost as if forces were conspiring against them, as if some dark power was at work, sticking felt dolls of Stroud and Ka’imi Fairbairn full of pins, or ritually sacrificing one of several dozen Raiders fans held captive underneath Arrowhead Stadium to the football gods for each sack. (I won’t even bring up the possibility of TayVoodoo.)
And that game wasn’t even close, by Chiefs standards.
Throughout Kansas City’s 15-2 regular season and their run to Sunday’s AFC championship game, the Chiefs have pulled off narrow victory after narrow victory, often in seemingly miraculous fashion. The Chiefs have tied the NFL record with 11 wins in one-score games this season; they haven’t lost a one-score game since 2023. Teams that win a lot of one-score games are often (rightly) deemed to be fraudulent, coasting on randomness and lucky breaks rather than actual ability. That was certainly the case with the 2022 Vikings, the other team to win 11 one-score games in a season, who lost immediately to the Giants in the first round of the playoffs.
Kansas City is not so easy to dismiss, for obvious Mahomesian reasons. This is a team that has won back-to-back Super Bowls and is trying for an NFL-record third straight. The Chiefs have the best quarterback in the game, perhaps the best head coach and best defensive coordinator, the NFL’s all-time leader in playoff receptions in Kelce, an elite interior offensive line, a disruptive pass rusher in Chris Jones, an All-Pro corner in Trent McDuffie, and a kicker who, while viewing half the population as human incubators, doesn’t miss often. That’s a legit contender. It’s certainly enough to win the Super Bowl.
But for all their macro-level dominance, the Chiefs’ performances in individual games have been anything but. It took walk-off field goals by three separate kickers this season to get Kansas City to 15 wins. Mahomes’s offense has yet to score more than 30 points in a game. The Chiefs seem to exist to go on methodical 16-play drives that are brutally dull but viciously effective—and often aided by a defensive penalty or two. It’s a bit odd to watch a team that recently won through high-flying fireworks and exciting playmaking shift its identity toward boring inevitability and just squeaking by, and it’s inspired the sentiment that there’s a dark magic to this team that helps them do just enough to win—no more and no less.
It started in the first game of the year, a rematch of last season’s AFC title game between the Chiefs and Ravens. Baltimore got the ball, down seven, with just under two minutes to play in the fourth quarter, and drove 77 yards to the Chiefs’ 10-yard line. On the final play of the game, Lamar Jackson threw a pass into the end zone to tight end Isaiah Likely that was originally ruled a touchdown, only to have the catch overturned when replay showed Likely’s toe had just barely grazed the white line.
Look how close that is! Spooky.
Week 2 brought another AFC rival, the Bengals. Kansas City trailed by two points after the two-minute warning, but managed to win the game 26-25 after Cincinnati safety Daijahn Anthony was called for pass interference on a fourth-and-16 throw from Mahomes. The pass was incomplete, but the penalty gave the Chiefs a new set of downs and set up Harrison Butker’s game-winning 51-yard field goal.
It was a sliding-door moment for the season. The Bengals, of course, missed the playoffs by a single win. The Chiefs probably would have needed an additional loss in a meaningful game to lose the no. 1 seed in the AFC to the Bills, but who knows. It’s possible that Anthony’s contact with Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice, which was only a split-second early and decided a game in which Mahomes threw for just 151 yards, wound up altering the AFC playoff picture.
In Week 3, the Chiefs got two fourth-down stops in the final five minutes to beat the Falcons, 22-17. Before the first stop, it looked as though officials missed a pass interference penalty on Chiefs safety Brendan Cook, who ran into tight end Kyle Pitts in the end zone before the ball arrived. Noted.
In Week 9, it took overtime for the Chiefs to beat the Bucs, 30-24. Then, in Week 10, came the Broncos.
With one second on the clock and the Chiefs up by two, 16-14, the Broncos lined up for what would have been a 35-yard, game-winning field goal. But Kansas City linebacker Leo Chenal timed his jump perfectly, diving with his arms outstretched and blocking Wil Lutz’s kick. The Chiefs credited their film study and an observed weakness in the Broncos’ line leading to the block. But by that point in the season they were 9-0, having won games via multiple controversial calls, late stops, a blocked field goal, and the sliver of a toe. And yet, there was more dark magic to come.
In Week 13, Mahomes stood on the sideline with a 19-17 lead as Aidan O’Connell drove the Raiders into Chiefs’ territory on Las Vegas’s final possession. O’Connell spiked the ball at the Kansas City 32-yard line with 16 seconds to go, setting up Las Vegas with a third-and-3 within field goal range. But kicker Daniel Carlson had missed three long field goal attempts already in the game—from 55, 56, and 58 yards—so instead of attempting a 50-yarder, the Raiders opted to try running one more play to move slightly closer, and to take more time off the clock in case Mahomes got the ball back.
Las Vegas lined up in shotgun. But rookie center Jackson Powers-Johnson snapped the ball when O’Connell wasn’t paying attention, and it bounced off the quarterback’s arm. Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton recovered the fumble. Officials threw multiple flags on the play, and at least one of them signaled a false start on Las Vegas, which would have nullified the play and the fumble and moved the Raiders back 5 yards but given them another shot on third-and-8. However, after a huddle, referee Clay Martin said they were calling a penalty for an illegal shift, which Kansas City declined. Game over. In the aftermath, replay showed right guard Dylan Parham tapping Powers-Johnson on the shoulder right before he snapped the ball, which might have been the source of the Raiders’ discombobulation.
“We’re 13.5-point underdogs, nobody believes we can go in there and win, and we had them fucking right on the ropes, so, disappointing to say the least,” Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby said after the game.
The Chiefs had seemingly exhausted every manner of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and it seemed like they’d make it through their Week 14 prime-time game against the Chargers without any bizarre twists. That was until kicker Matthew Wright doinked a 31-yard field goal off the left upright, ricocheting perfectly through the uprights. With that kick, Wright became the third different Chiefs kicker to hit a last-second game-winner this season—and this one clinched the division title for Kansas City. And if it had seemed true metaphorically already, the Chiefs were literally getting the good bounces.
This could be voodoo, or it could simply be what good teams do. The well-oiled squads get to spend more time on situational football, so they get better at things like blocking kicks and their quarterbacks get better at knowing what they can and can’t get away with with particular officiating crews. The Chiefs lost their regular-season matchup with the Bills, so it’s possible that they were a toe, a lucky doink, and a bad snap away from being the away team in the AFC championship game.
Buffalo knows what it’s like to lose to the Chiefs on a 13-second drive and without getting the ball in overtime. The Bills have missed field goals and argued questionable calls that haven’t gone their way. They know what so many other teams learned or re-learned this season. With their dark magic, the Chiefs find ways to win.
