Henry McKenna
NFL Reporter
Age shows up in funny ways. Maybe it’s a joint that cracks and pops louder than a log in the fireplace. Maybe it’s that you’re tired all the time, even with that earlier bedtime. Maybe it’s the tangible body changes — weight, strength, speed, height, you name it. Maybe you can’t log the same hours at work that you used to.
Maybe that all amounts to a dropped football. On the goal line. In the fourth quarter. Of Week 2.
You know who and what I’m talking about.
Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs haven’t seen the ball bounce their way in 2025. In 2024, it was exactly the opposite, too much of a pattern to think it was simply dumb luck. There was a ton of preparation involved. I believe in the old cliché: Luck is the residue of hard work and preparation.
So what does that say about the 2025 season? And the 2025 Chiefs?
Maybe it’s that they’re not working hard enough. Not yet.
“It’s hard to eat when you’re full,” Michael Strahan said on “FOX NFL Sunday” before Kansas City’s loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. “The Chiefs have been eating a long time. A lot of guys are full now. Are they willing to put in the work?”
After the game, Mahomes said he planned to do just that — get back to work. Faced with questions about the Chiefs’ stagnant offense, the three-time Super Bowl MVP kept pointing to himself and the small details he missed against the Eagles. Mahomes mentioned “work” 10 different times in his postgame press conference.
“Knowing the guys in the locker room, man, I think they’re just going to respond by working,” Mahomes said Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium. “I think the guys that we have in this locker room will go back to work with that mindset of, ‘We’re going to continue to work even harder,’ so that when we step on that field this next time, we can find a way to win in those big moments, like we haven’t in these first two weeks.”
Patrick Mahomes takes a sack during the fourth quarter against the Eagles while Travis Kelce looks on in frustration. Mahomes was just 16-of-29 for 187 yards in the game. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
It’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to do it.
Former Kansas City quarterback Chad Henne provided some insight on what that work might look like. He recalled how the Chiefs audited their offense back in 2021 after starting the season 1-2.
“We did an evaluation of ourselves, what plays were we executing well, what plays not so well,” Henne told me. “We scratched the ones we weren’t doing well and kept the ones we were good at. We went back to the basics: plays, fundamentals, telling each other to do their job and be accountable to one another.”
That process will make for some hard, humbling hours at the team facility.
The Chiefs have been grinding away for years now. They’ve played more games than any other NFL team in this three-year Super Bowl window. And that’s despite not having the most talented roster in the league the past few years. Last season, the talent gap showed prominently in the Super Bowl, when the supremely talented Eagles pounded Mahomes & Co.
Yes, the Chiefs have a supremely talented quarterback. But essentially, they win because of their work, their preparation and their situational awareness. That’s where the art of narrow victory comes from. They essentially told me as much last year.
So Kelce’s drop felt emblematic of what isn’t working for the Chiefs this year.
The magic isn’t happening. Worse still, that seems to be what they’re waiting for: magic.
You can’t wait for it. You have to work for it.
They’ve been conditioned to think the coaching staff and/or Mahomes will snap their fingers and make something happen. And by the way, they nearly did on Sunday. That 49-yard touchdown pass to Tyquan Thornton with three minutes left nearly got the Chiefs back into the game. Nearly. Turned out, the Kelce drop was too much to overcome. Because it wasn’t just that Kelce dropped the ball. It was that the pass deflected directly into the hands of Eagles rookie safety Andrew Mukuba.
A bad bounce.
The Chiefs haven’t seen many of those recently.
“I think I threw it just a tad too early, just trying to put it on his body low before that hole player got there,” Mahomes said of his pass to Kelce. “I think if I can put it more on his body and not so far out in front of him, then he can catch it, take the hit and get in the end zone.”
It’s true Mahomes was a hair early. But it’s the type of play everyone has come to expect the 10-time Pro Bowl tight end to make. Recently, however, Kelce hasn’t been making those plays. He had two drops against the Eagles this week — and he had multiple drops in the Super Bowl.
If Kelce is not going to make a play, who else is out there? The Chiefs don’t currently have an answer.
Look at Mahomes’ final three throws against the Chargers in Week 1: all incompletions. No magic, not even in the fourth quarter. Nobody was there to help Mahomes.
Kelce will turn 36 on Oct. 5. He’s aging. We can see it in the little and big moments.
At 31, defensive tackle Chris Jones is starting to age as well. That’ll begin to show up more and more.
The problem isn’t just that those guys aren’t making game-changing plays. It’s that the Chiefs are asking a 36-year-old tight end to make these plays. The front office expected Xavier Worthy (shoulder injury) and Rashee Rice (suspension) to be the next generation of playmakers. They’re not in the lineup right now. That’s both a hopeful and frustrating reality.
“To catch Tom Brady [in Super Bowl titles], Mahomes is going to have to do the thing Brady did,” former Patriots safety and NBC analyst Devin McCourty told me. “[Mahomes has to] win with an established group of vets. Then they all retire, and he has to take a bunch of young guys to the Super Bowl and retire with them.”
Since 1990, only 12.2% of the teams that started 0-2 have reached the playoffs. Mahomes had never started 0-2 before. Reid had done it only one other time with the Chiefs, in 2014, and he missed the postseason.
If the Chiefs want to make the playoffs this season, they have to dig deep.
That’s Kelce. That’s Jones. That’s Andy Reid. That’s Mahomes.
They all have to go back to work. They have to eat when they’re full, as Strahan would say. If the Chiefs can patch together a few wins, their key receivers can then keep it going when they come back. Maybe another reinforcement will arrive on the trade market. And they can turn this around — with a renewed sense of magic — in time for another postseason run.
But everyone needs to stop waiting for Mahomes to make magic. Everyone else needs to make some magic of their own.
Before joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna.
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