It seems like a decade since we last saw NFL football, but don’t worry folks, we have finally made it to the best part of the year! Leaves will be fallin’, temps will be droppin’ and the Kansas City Chiefs will be ballin’.
The NFL season starts Thursday with the Houston Texans traveling to face the defending Super Bowl Champion Chiefs. This week is the last opportunity for Chiefs Kingdom to celebrate the success of last season. Once the ball is kicked off Thursday night after raising the Super Bowl banner, last season’s success no longer matters.
Every day this week leading up to kickoff we will go over the biggest moments from the Chiefs’ Super Bowl campaign. It’s important to remember those moments, good or bad. Each one of them plays a part in the season many of us will never forget. Today’s moment is the first time we saw the Chiefs offense explode and a new weapon was brought onto the scene.
Before we reach that point though, let’s take a look at one of the biggest moments early last season for the Chiefs. In hindsight, this game was a foreshadowing moment for what was to come in the playoffs. It was Week Two against the Oakland Raiders and would be the last time the Chiefs ever played in the Oakland Coliseum.
Oakland ended their first drive with a field goal and then with under five minutes to go in the first quarter, quarterback Derek Carr took a shot deep downfield and got an interference call on Tyrann Mathieu to put the Raiders in the red-zone. They scored quickly and that was the end of the first quarter. The Chiefs offense was held quiet as the Raiders took a 10-0 lead.
This was the first time the Chiefs offense was held from scoring in the first quarter since Patrick Mahomes took over as the starting quarterback. That did not last long as the Chiefs’ first play of the second quarter was a deep pass from Mahomes to a wide-open Demarcus Robinson for a touchdown. This was the start of the 28 unanswered points by the Chiefs offense. This is where my foreshadowing comes into play because that is exactly what we saw the Chiefs do in the second week of the playoffs against the Houston Texans.
The next scoring play came on a 3rd-and-20. Mahomes hit Mecole Hardman deep across the middle for the rookie’s first receiving touchdown in the NFL. After that, it was a perfectly placed deep pass to Travis Kelce between two defenders for another touchdown in the middle of the quarter. Then, with less than a minute to go in the half, Mahomes throws one more touchdown to Robinson, who comes down hard folding his body like a lawn chair to maintain the catch.
Going into the second half it was the Chiefs’ defense as they picked off Carr twice and sacked him multiple times. The Raiders didn’t score again.
Once the second quarter started it was all Kansas City. It was the first time in 2019 that we saw how explosive the offense could be. The league saw the weapons the Chiefs’ had even with Tyreek Hill sitting out. They knew about Travis Kelce already, but Sammy Watkins had a big
Week One and Robinson exploded in Week Two, plus Hardman appeared on the scene as another deep threat.
This was the moment last season when everybody in the NFL knew the Chiefs offense was as good on the field as it was on paper.