The Kansas City Chiefs are 2-0, and I’m more nervous about them right now than I was after Week 1, because it took overtime and a 40-yard walk-off field goal from Harrison Butker to beat an Indianapolis Colts team that dropped to 0-2 in the process.
Patrick Mahomes threw for 382 yards and Kansas City still trailed three times, which might be the real headline of this game. According to ESPN’s box score, he went 32-of-47 with three touchdowns, one of them to Travis Kelce on a night the tight end caught nine passes for 101 yards. None of that stopped Indianapolis from taking a 20-17 lead into the locker room.
Three separate deficits. Not one bad quarter, not a slow start they shook off by halftime — three different times the scoreboard had Kansas City behind a team most people penciled in for a lost season.
Tyler Warren caught a first-quarter touchdown, Jonathan Taylor ran for two more, and Spencer Shrader was automatic on field goals all night, per FootballNationUSA’s recap of the quarter-by-quarter scoring. The Chiefs trailed 7-3 early, trailed 13-10 in the second quarter, and trailed again at the half, 20-17, after Taylor’s go-ahead run with under a minute left before the break. That’s a lot of chasing for a team that’s supposed to be chasing nobody.
Kansas City needed a walk-off field goal to beat a winless team, and I don’t care how many rings are in the trophy case, that’s a sentence that should make Chiefs fans uncomfortable. Butker missed an early attempt and then made every one that mattered after — a 46-yarder in the first quarter, a 28-yarder in the fourth, a 31-yard go-ahead kick in overtime, and finally the 40-yarder that ended it as the clock hit zero. Outkick’s account of the finish called it a game-winner drilled under real pressure, and they weren’t exaggerating. Indianapolis is walking out of Arrowhead as a team riding the NFL’s longest active losing streak, and it still took every last one of those kicks to put them away.
Kenneth Walker III set up his own game-winner. He hauled in a 22-yard catch in overtime to go with 117 rushing yards on 24 carries, and for Kenneth Walker III’s bargain of a contract, that’s the best value signing of Kansas City’s offseason wearing a helmet on a night the passing game needed the help.
I’ll give the offense this much.
Down 20-17 at the half against a team with nothing left to lose, Mahomes didn’t blink, and neither did Walker. Kelce is still a matchup nightmare at an age when most tight ends are filming local car dealership commercials. If those three stay this locked in every week, Kansas City survives plenty of Sundays that look like this one.
But I keep circling back to questions about Mahomes coming off a torn ACL, because an offense that trails three separate times to a team that entered Sunday still searching for its first win is not an offense operating at full strength. Torn ACL or not, that’s the version of the Chiefs the rest of the AFC just watched tape on, and they’re going to notice it a lot sooner than the playoffs.
I had Kansas City minus the points on this one and spent overtime watching my bet slip die in real time, and I’m still not mad about it, because that Colts defense earned every dollar it cost me.
Here’s Butker’s kick sailing through, courtesy of the league’s own account:
https://twitter.com/NFL/status/2101882802467688655
Chiefs fans get to keep the 2-0 record and the highlight. Everybody else gets to file this one away for January, when a team that trails three times to the Colts might not get overtime to bail it out.
