Another week, another close Kansas City Chiefs victory to help keep the team’s undefeated record intact.

This time around, the back-to-back Super Bowl champs took down a battered Los Angeles Chargers team at SoFi Stadium. After some back-and-forth in the first half, Kansas City ultimately pulled away with a big-time offensive score and the defense shut the door on the home squad. It’s a 4-0 start for the Chiefs, and one that left plenty of room for growth.

With that in mind, let’s point out some of the Chiefs’ biggest winners and losers from the fourth week of the regular season.

Chris Jones, the unquestioned closer of the Kansas City defense, was fantastic on Sunday. Not only did the All-Pro defensive tackle get a sack to kill a Chargers drive late in the first half, but he also had another one late in the game to help bring things home. Jones’s pressure of Herbert to force a throw in the final frame resulted in a turnover on downs. It’s been a great start to the season for the CEO of ‘Sack Nation,’ and having another productive interior rusher like Tershawn Wharton (who had a good game in his own right) next to him surely helps the entire line.

Carson Steele is a perfect example of how life in the NFL comes at you fast. A week ago, the undrafted free agent was coming off an inspiring performance on Sunday Night Football against the Atlanta Falcons and seemed to be the unquestioned top option to replace Isiah Pacheco. This past weekend, he had just two carries on offense and one of them was fumbled. Head coach Andy Reid opted for Kareem Hunt (more on that later) for the rest of the game. Steele also got his wires crossed with quarterback Patrick Mahomes on a play extension in the passing game. Reid says he isn’t down on Steele by any means, but his workload will be worth monitoring.

It isn’t too common for a punter to end up in the “winners” section, but here we are again with Matt Araiza. He had his best game as a pro on Sunday, amassing 200 yards on four punts and landing all of them inside the 20-yard line of Los Angeles. Two of them were inside the 10, putting the home team behind the proverbial eight-ball to start their drives. The ability to flip the field is an important aspect, even in the modern NFL, and Araiza displayed to to near-perfection in the fourth week of the season.

Speaking of the fourth week, that’s how long it took Skyy Moore to get his first target in the passing game this season. He logged a second one later on, although it was more of a throwaway by Mahomes. The one he did get a chance on, however, was a third-down pass that got dropped. If Moore’s role is already in question, not converting on his only real opportunity thus far is not the way to solidify things. The former second-round pick continues to underwhelm in his Chiefs tenure.

With Rashee Rice suffering a knee injury early in Sunday’s game, Kansas City desperately needed other options to step up in the passing game. Luckily for them, Travis Kelce and Xavier Worthy did exactly that. The former looked like himself in the box score for the first time all year, hauling in seven passes for 89 yards. Worthy, the Chiefs’ first-round pick, took advantage of a rare deep ball thrown by Mahomes and caught it for a 54-yard touchdown. The long-term viability of these two should Rice miss serious time is questionable, but they kept the offense afloat during a critical time in Week 4.

Let’s preface this by saying Jawaan Taylor has largely been nothing short of awesome in his second season with the Chiefs. His play isn’t represented by his Week 4 performance. With that said, the veteran right tackle got beat by Bud Dupree for a sack in the first half and committed a pair of false start penalties overall. That, combined with a holding infraction, made for a rough game. The worry scale is still hovering around zero, though, moving forward.

Many expected Hunt to have some sort of duty in the Kansas City backfield, but it’s hard to have envisioned him looking as solid as he did on Sunday. The former third-round pick seemed to have a lot more burst than he did last year with the Cleveland Browns, and he amassed 69 rushing yards against the Chargers’ defense. The Chiefs are happy with what Hunt was able to do on the ground and in the passing game and with Steele struggling, it’s reasonable to anticipate a decent role for Hunt moving forward.

In a very out-of-character start to the season, Mahomes continues to play surprisingly poor football and is even holding the Chiefs’ offense back at times. On Sunday, he overthrew an ugly interception intended for Travis Kelce and accidentally took out Rice on the same play. Mahomes’s overall numbers were pedestrian – 245 yards, a touchdown and a pick – and advanced numbers like EPA per play (-0.08) reflect the same. His pocket presence is all over the place right now. Kansas City can clearly still win with this version of Mahomes, but they’ll surely be hoping for better outings in the future.

Read More: Four Takeaways from the Kansas City Chiefs’ 17-10 Win Over the LA Chargers

Any coach in any sport will tell you that a win is a win: no matter how you get there, it’s a good thing. But how good can the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs feel about their 4-0 start this season after Sunday’s scratchy 17-10 win over the Los Angeles Chargers?

Yes, the Chiefs are undefeated, but their point differential of +20 shows just how vulnerable they’ve been and they could easily be 1-3 – or worse – if a few plays had gone differently in each of their games this season. This Chiefs team looks like last season’s, when they had to hope for Patrick Mahomes to get hot at the right time in an uneven offense with mystery receivers.

Through Kansas City’s first three wins, even future Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce was feeling the burn: he had caught just eight passes on 13 targets for 69 yards and no touchdowns. In the week leading up to the Chargers game, head coach Andy Reid said he was using Kelce as a decoy to get other receivers (particularly Rashee Rice) open. And when Rice suffered what looked to be a serious knee injury early in this game, Kelce responded with seven catches on nine targets for 89 yards.

Even this came with a dark underpinning. Initial reports indicate that Rice may have suffered a season-ending torn ACL, which would be a further devastating blow to the Chiefs’ passing game.

Then there’s the matter of one Patrick Lavon Mahomes II.

Last season, Mahomes was the NFL’s worst deep passer. Despite the fact that the Chiefs won their third Super Bowl in five seasons, Mahomes completed just 24 of 76 passes of 20+ air yards for 817 yards, leading to two touchdowns, six interceptions, and a passer rating of 49.1 (the league’s lowest rating among quarterbacks who took at least 50% of their teams’ snaps). Coming into Sunday, Reid and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy hadn’t given Mahomes too many opportunities to chuck it deep this time around. Mahomes had completed four of just seven deep attempts for 171 yards, three touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 101.8. The improved efficiency is nice, but turning someone with Mahomes’s interstellar talent into a checkdown artist seems reductive at best.

Mahomes did hit rookie speed receiver Xavier Worthy for a 54-yard touchdown in the second quarter against the Chargers, but other than that, those explosive passes came few and far between on Sunday.

Are the Chiefs in a similar spot to last season – when they have to rely on Steve Spagnuolo’s defense to even get into the playoffs – while Mahomes deals with an uncertain receiving corps outside Kelce? We will know a lot more as the Chiefs go into a particularly tough part of their schedule: they face difficult defenses – the New Orleans Saints, the San Francisco 49ers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Denver Broncos, and Buffalo Bills – in five of their next six games. Las Vegas provide what may be the only “get well” game, and you never know which Raiders defense you’re going to get.

So yes, a win is a win. But to paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, some wins are more equal than others.

MVP of the week

Baker Mayfield, QB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Coming into Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Vic Fangio’s Philadelphia Eagles defense had played no cornerbacks in press coverage on 88% of its snaps, by far the highest rate in the league. Most of the NFL is undergoing a return to the old-school press coverage of prior eras, where cornerbacks are manned up on receivers from the snap through the route, because there are so many more quick throws. And when you don’t have time to disrupt the quarterback, you had better disrupt the receivers.

Bucs offensive coordinator Liam Coen had certainly studied the Eagles’ passive coverage tendencies, and most likely believed that Mayfield could have a field day against Philly, which is exactly what happened. In a 33-16 Bucs win, Mayfield completed 30 of 47 passes for 347 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions. Mayfield also had a rushing touchdown in the game, and when he was really dealing as a passer you saw how Tampa Bay’s passing game was able to exploit Philly’s preferences for playing their cornerbacks yards off the line of scrimmage.

Mayfield’s performance may have been a simple example of his taking advantage of an unprepared defense, but he’s never played better in his NFL career.

Video of the week

Speaking of the Eagles, they should have known they were in trouble before the game even started. At Raymond James Stadium, the Bucs are famous for shooting cannons as part of their pregame ceremonies, and that really spooked Philadelphia tight end Dallas Goedert.

Goedert did catch seven passes on eight targets for 62 yards in the game, but perhaps he would have done even more without the trauma.

Stat of the week

-7. That’s how many yards Denver Broncos rookie quarterback Bo Nix threw for in the first half of his team’s game against the New York Jets at a rain-sodden MetLife Stadium. Amazingly, Nix managed that total on seven completions. Nix wasn’t much better in the second half, completing 12 of 25 passes overall for 60 yards, a touchdown, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 67.9. And somehow, the Broncos beat the Jets, 10-9. Aaron Rodgers was hardly stellar himself, partly because he was sacked five times by Denver’s aggressive, hyper-blitzing defense.

Nix made some interesting history. Per Pro Football Reference, there hasn’t been an NFL quarterback since 1950 on the winning end of a game throwing 60 or fewer yards on 25 or more attempts.

Elsewhere around the league

– The 1992 San Diego Chargers are the only NFL team to begin their season with an 0-4 record and still make the postseason. Bobby Ross’s team back then is the only hope for head coach Doug Pederson’s Jacksonville Jaguars, who have that same ignominious mark after Sunday’s heartbreaking 24-20 loss to the Houston Texans.

The Jags collapsed spectacularly last season, causing them to spend decisively in free agency, and the decision was made to give alleged franchise quarterback Trevor Lawrence a five-year, $275m contract extension. “Make no mistake: this is the best team assembled by the Jacksonville Jaguars ever,” Jags owner Shad Khan said before the season began. “Best players. Best coaches. But most importantly, let’s prove it by winning now.” There’s been no winning so far. Pederson may have to mirror Ross’s improbable comeback to survive this mess.

— One week after they demolished the Dallas Cowboys’ run defense, the Baltimore Ravens were at it again on Sunday night against the Buffalo Bills. In the first half alone, Baltimore ran the ball 14 times for 146 yards, including this Derrick Henry 87-yard touchdown run early in the first quarter.

Henry is 30 and had 2,251 career carries coming into this game, so all the age and workload warnings affected his value this past offseason. He wound up signing a two-year, $16m contract with Baltimore with just $9m guaranteed, but he is as ridiculously fast as he’s always been. Per Next Gen Stats, Henry reached a maximum speed of 21.29 mph on his touchdown run. Henry has reached or exceeded 20 mph 27 times as a ballcarrier since 2018, trailing only Tyreek Hill, who has 73 such plays.

Henry finished his day with 199 rushing yards on 24 carries as the Ravens evened their record at 2-2, dominating the formerly undefeated Bills in a 35-10 win. The combination of Henry, Lamar Jackson’s extreme threat as a runner, and Baltimore’s smaller backs like Justice Hill and Keaton Mitchell (who is soon returning from injury and was amazing in 2023) – not to mention an outstanding offensive line – make Baltimore’s run game tough to handle.

— In their first three games of the season, Brian Flores’s Minnesota Vikings defense had allowed just 30 total points, the fewest against any NFL defense since 1998. It was a more mixed bag on Sunday as the Vikings held on to beat the Packers 31-29. But Flores has shown he is a fine defensive mind. Green Bay QB Jordan Love was in a nightmare in the first-half, thanks in part to Flores’s schemes, completing just 12 of 24 passes for 118 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 43.4. The Vikings built up a 28-0 first half lead. Then, in the second half, Packers head coach and offensive shot-caller Matt LaFleur (also one of the best in the business) threw a shot at Flores with a ton of no-huddle plays, which forced Minnesota to play more base defenses with fewer wrinkles.

There isn’t one thing Flores adheres to at the expense of anything else. Flores prefers zone coverage to man, but how he gets to his coverage shells is especially devious. It’s the rare play when Flores’ cornerbacks and safeties don’t start in one spot in the formation pre-snap, and then charge quickly to dramatically different positions after the ball is snapped. As much as any defensive coach at any level of football, Flores has taken the NFL’s new preferences for pre-snap motion and difficult receiver distribution, and thrown those ideas right back in the faces of those offenses.

Is Flores the NFL’s best defensive coordinator? Right now, you’d be hard pressed to put anyone above him. Whether that gets him another shot at a head coaching job is debatable, given his lawsuit with the NFL and the aftermath of his difficult relationship with quarterback Tua Tagovailoa during his time in charge of Miami.

— Anthony Richardson was ruled out for the rest of the Colts-Steelers game after two big hits in the first quarter. Richardson is a transcendent talent who, at this point in his career, veers sharply between the spectacular and the ridiculous. One thing he needs to solve is his proclivity for running straight into hard contact. Most mobile quarterbacks have learned when to slide and otherwise avoid hits; Richardson doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo yet.

In his rookie season of 2023, Richardson missed all but four games with a multitude of injuries, and unless something changes, the story may well be similar this time around.

The Colts turned to veteran backup Joe Flacco, who will celebrate his 40th birthday in January. Flacco completed 16 of 26 passes for 168 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 105.9 in the 27-24 win over Pittsburgh. Going back to his 2023 stint as Deshaun Watson’s injury replacement with the Cleveland Browns, Flacco holds the NFL’s longest streak of games with two or more passing touchdowns. You could have won a lot of bets with that titbit. Also, per Baltimore Ravens PR, Flacco has helped his team win games with Baltimore, the team that lost a team to Baltimore (the Browns), and the team that left Baltimore (the Colts). If you play in the NFL long enough, time is indeed a flat circle.

Kansas football’s season has spiraled into frustration as the team suffered its fourth consecutive loss, falling 38-27 to TCU at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

The Jayhawks (1-4, 0-2 Big 12) have yet to find their rhythm, and after a promising start, the issues that have plagued them all season persisted, costing them yet another winnable game.

Inconsistent Quarterback Play

Jalon Daniels, who came into the season with high expectations, has struggled to find consistency. His 15-for-34 performance for 179 yards against TCU marked another game where his passing efficiency was below 50%. Despite showing flashes of potential, Daniels has not completed a game with more than 200 passing yards this season. His inconsistency in key moments, particularly the late interception in this game, continues to hold the Jayhawks back.

Missed Opportunities on Defense

Kansas’ defense has had its moments, like OJ Burroughs’ interception, but they’ve been unable to consistently apply pressure. TCU’s quarterback Josh Hoover torched the Jayhawks for 356 yards and three touchdowns. The lack of defensive stops, combined with missed tackles and breakdowns in coverage, have become a recurring problem. WR Jack Bech’s 10 catches for 131 yards highlighted how TCU’s offense exploited KU’s vulnerabilities in the secondary, regardless of the fact that Mello Dotson and Cobee Bryant were preseason Thorpe Award watchlist nominees.

Inability to Close Games

Kansas has had opportunities to win, leading at different points in the second half of games, only to collapse in critical moments. Against TCU, the Jayhawks led 24-21 after an early third-quarter touchdown, but a special teams blunder—a punt return touchdown—shifted momentum. Granted, there was a blatant missed block in the back call, but the Jayhawks couldn’t respond as TCU outscored them 17-3 the rest of the way.

Kansas will need to regroup as they prepare for Arizona State next week. With frustration mounting and the season slipping away, the Jayhawks must find answers soon to salvage what’s left of a campaign that began with high hopes.

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