How a Christmas Day wake-up call helped the Chiefs return to the Super Bowl

LAS VEGAS – The thought has been on Brett Veach's mind for a week: The “what if” questions that lingered after a season-ending loss left the Kansas City general manager grappling with a reality he didn't want to face. was used to.

“You see it every year,” says Veach, “a team gets off to a good start and doesn't make the playoffs.”

Five weeks ago the concern was real.

That could be usVeach remembers thinking.

Sure, it's easy for Veach to admit this now, as he stands on the field at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas six nights before the Chiefs play in their fourth Super Bowl in five years. But the GM is convinced that without that Christmas Day humiliation — an ugly 20-14 loss to the Raiders at home — there's no way his team is 60 Minutes away from cementing itself as the NFL's modern dynasty with a third Lombardi Trophy since 2020.

“If we could find a way to win that game… maybe the wake-up call will come in the playoffs,” Veach acknowledged. “I think we not only had to lose, but we had to lose like that.”

That Fashion, Veach explained, was what bothered him most on December 25. It was a snapshot of a struggling team, a moment that hadn't been good for the better part of a month. The Raiders outplayed the Chiefs that day — “We were physically dominated in our own spot,” Veach said — and Kansas City's offense was sloppy and disjointed, as it was for most of the second half of the game . season. The defense, which had been excellent for most of the afternoon, couldn't get the stop it needed late.

The Raiders struck, turning two Chiefs' blunders into touchdowns seven seconds apart in the second quarter. They then cemented the victory with a six-play, 61-yard drive late in the fourth quarter, leaving Patrick Mahomes on the sideline and unable to steal a victory in the final seconds.

These kinds of wins — the kind of wins the Chiefs got away with during a 7-2 start — were merely “deodorant,” Veach called them, camouflaging the very real flaws that had been lurking since midseason.

The loss camouflaged nothing. The loss exposed a defending champion who was suddenly vulnerable, eminently beatable and sliding into January a shell of his former self. It was Kansas City's fifth loss in eight games, foreign territory for a perennial Super Bowl contender, and the Chiefs' sixth of the season, the most since Mahomes became the starter in 2018.

They were from 9 to 6 as December came to an end. The image of the AFC playoff came into view. The Ravens hit everyone. The bills were red hot.

And the champions broke free.

Veach remembers the frustrations, months of pent-up emotions, that erupted on the sidelines that afternoon. Mahomes berated his offensive linemen in full view of the cameras. Travis Kelce put his helmet on the bench and bounced high into the air. Coach Andy Reid forbids a team staffer from giving it back moments later to Kelce, and after a few choice words bumped into his star.

Mahomes gives his line the BUSINESS pic.twitter.com/l1Jg731yn6

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) December 25, 2023

After the game was over, the Chiefs' top decision makers, including owner Clark Hunt, Veach and Reid, gathered for a postgame meeting in the coaches' locker room, as they always do. Most of their heads were pointed downwards, Hunt recalls, as they stared at the floor.

Something wasn't right. Something had been wrong for weeks. What no one in Kansas City knew at the time: Whether this was the low point that would send a season moving in a different direction, or an omen that would herald a painful playoff loss just weeks away.

Or, Veach worried, the unthinkable: no postseason travel at all.

To that point, the Chiefs still hadn't accomplished anything.

“Definitely one of those deals where it was now or never,” says the GM. “Just because you won the Super Bowl last year just because you had some success doesn't mean you're going to win before the ball is kicked off.”

“We need a little kick in the tail,” Reid acknowledged. The loss, he later said, was a stark reminder to his team that “things don't just fall into our laps.”

After the game the coach was irritated, but was not deterred. In the locker room, Reid stood in front of his team and took the blame. Everything.

“I'll take this one on the chin,” Reid told his players.

According to some, that stuck with the players. This was not on the bus, they still think. This was on them. They weren't ready to play yet.

“We're all grown men,” rookie receiver Rashee Rice said, “we didn't like that.”

Rice acknowledged that some were distracted.

“A lot of us weren't really in game mode because it was Christmas and stuff like that,” Rice continued. “A lot of us weren't ready to play at Christmas.”

A win would have clinched an eighth straight AFC West title, which has become an annual rite of passage in Kansas City. Instead, Mahomes was sacked four times and staggered to one of his worst passer ratings of the season, finishing with just 235 passing yards on 58 dropbacks.

“When you get a chance to win the division and you come out and lay an egg like we did, it definitely resets you, fuels you and lets you know, 'Man, we're not close to where we must be'. said linebacker Drue Tranquill.

“It was a poor reflection of who we were as a team,” guard Trey Smith added. “But at that moment we were as a team.”

And who they were by the time the regular season ended: a team defined by its defense but hamstrung by a mediocre offense that was perhaps the worst of the Reid era. The Chiefs finished 14th in scoring this season, one spot behind a Colts team that posted nine wins, mostly with a backup quarterback in Gardner Minshew, and four spots behind a Browns team that was in service four starting quarterbacks in 2023.

Of Reid's five Super Bowl teams in Kansas City, this year's group ranks near the bottom in regular-season record (11-6), points per game (21.8) and point differential (plus-77).

“More than any other year, we were challenged to put points on the board,” Kelce said this week.

This late in the season, the GM said, the coach took a step back. Reid took a macro look at everything that went wrong during the offense. (It was more than just a league-high 44 dropped passes.) Reid realized the coaches were trying to do too much with the offense, looking for a spark that wouldn't come.

“When you follow motorsports, sometimes it's like going into the race and every pit stop there's a little adjustment,” Veach explains. “And you make an adjustment and it's a bad change, and I think we had a little bit of that this year. The car wasn't perfect. We went in, made some adjustments and made it even worse.”

Reid not only challenged the players, but also the coaching staff. “Let's go to the base,” he told them. “Let's be who we are. We have a great defense. We have more than enough on offense, and we don't have to sit here and make a game plan to try to score 60 points a game.”

He has summarized the script. He simplified the game plan.

The Chiefs haven't lost since.

Reid has gone out of his way in recent weeks to acknowledge the team's leadership: Mahomes has regained his form for all the world to see and Kelce has revived since the start of the playoffs. For its part, the offense has done enough. The challenge seemed to galvanize them, as this time they had to climb back to the Super Bowl without being the big favorites. They beat Miami in the bone-chilling cold, beat the Bills in snowy Orchard Park, and then upset the Ravens in Baltimore in the AFC title game.

Now they have the chance to become the league's first repeat champions in two decades.

“We knew we were going to be in a dogfight,” cornerback Trent McDuffie said. “We knew we had to do it on the road. We knew everyone would doubt us.”

Not anymore. Not after this run. Over the past month, the Chiefs have reminded everyone who they are and why they're struggling this time of year.

Ask the dolphins. Ask for the bills. Ask the Ravens.

Veach, who built this roster with Reid, still marvels at how quickly it happened — and the opportunity they earned themselves comes Sunday.

“If we hadn't had that moment where we realized, 'We're not a good football team'… But we got it in there,” the GM says, pausing and staring at the field.

Whatever That Whatever was missing, Veach's team was found just in time.

(Top photo: Denny Medley / USA Today)