The Chiefs certainly didn’t resemble a Super Bowl team on Christmas Day when they lost for the fourth time in six games, their record dipping to 9-6 and their offense managing just 14 points against the Raiders.
There were victory cigars in the visiting locker room at Arrowhead Stadium.
Patrick Mahomes lamented the Chiefs’ “one good game, one bad game, one good game, one bad game” flow. That wouldn’t last in the postseason.
Kansas City turned that low point into something that flipped its year around, stringing together five consecutive victories — including three in the postseason — to earn an appearance in Super Bowl LVIII against the 49ers on Feb. 11 in Las Vegas.
It’s a different path compared to past postseason runs. But for the fourth time in five years, the Chiefs secured a berth in the league’s final game due to a variety of factors meshing to allow their late-season resurgence:
Rashee Rice’s emergence
The first hint arrived Nov. 26 when Rice caught eight passes for 107 yards and a touchdown in the Chiefs’ win at the Raiders. He added another nine catches for 91 yards during their Dec. 17 victory at the Patriots, too.
Those two games were part of a nine-game stretch in which Rice — a rookie second-round pick — caught eight or more passes six times and recorded 70 or more receiving yards five times. He’s reached both of those thresholds twice during Kansas City’s winning streak, too.
When the Chiefs selected the former SMU star, Rice joined a receiving group that already returned Travis Kelce, Skyy Moore, Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Justin Watson. But he ended the regular season with the most yards by a Kansas City wideout not named Tyreek Hill since Jeremy Maclin (1,088) in 2015, topping JuJu Smith-Schuster’s 933 in 2022.
Rice emerged as the complement to Kelce that Mahomes has needed during this five-game stretch.
Isiah Pacheco’s touchdown streak
Near the end of the 2022 regular season, as the Chiefs won 10 of 11 games to enter the playoffs on a tear, Jerick McKinnon scored in six consecutive games — with all but one of those a receiving touchdown. Andy Reid’s offense has always been friendly for Chiefs running backs, dating back to Jamaal Charles, and last year, in that stretch, McKinnon benefitted from that.
This season, it’s Pacheco, the second-year back who has scored in seven consecutive games — two weeks of being inactive and one week without a snap in Week 18, for rest purposes, mixed in — entering the Super Bowl. Pacheco’s running style makes him difficult to tackle, and he turned 205 carries into 935 rushing yards across 14 games. He has added another 254 in the Chiefs’ three postseason games.
Steve Spagnuolo’s defensive surge
The defense orchestrated by the Giants’ former defensive coordinator was never really the problem this season. But Spagnuolo’s unit has allowed opponents to top 20 points just once — the Bills, in the AFC divisional round — across their winning streak. The Chiefs haven’t allowed an offense to score more than 27 points all season and surrendered the second-fewest points per game (17.3).
They didn’t have starting linebacker Nick Bolton for half of the regular season, including a five-week absence following wrist surgery, but he leads all defenders with 27 tackles during the playoffs and has logged 40 during their five-game tear. Bolton, like most of the key Kansas City starters, didn’t play in Week 18.
A vintage Mahomes-Kelce connection
Kelce spent press conferences and “New Heights” podcasts shutting down retirement rumors and reiterating why he doesn’t plan to stop playing after the season. But the reason why chatter surrounding that topic was amplified stemmed from his intermittent struggles in 2023.
He narrowly missed out on an eighth consecutive 1,000-yard season, but Kelce’s touchdowns dipped from 12 to five — including zero in his final six games of the regular season. Across the past two postseason games, though, Kelce has caught three touchdowns from Mahomes.
The pair passed Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski for most playoff touchdowns by a quarterback-tight end tandem. One week later, Kelce passed Jerry Rice’s all-time record of 151 postseason receptions.
Even if the Chiefs had won three consecutive games entering the divisional round, they needed the vintage version of Kelce to survive during their past two victories against the AFC’s No. 1 and No. 2 seeds.
Striking early fixes a stalling offense
When Mahomes and Kelce connected midway through the first quarter of the AFC Championship game, it marked the eighth consecutive postseason game in which the Chiefs scored on their opening possession. It’s happened all three times — touchdown, field goal, touchdown — this posteason and all four times Mahomes started (with Blaine Gabbert getting the Week 18 start) during their winning streak.
That’s different from their early-game offense prior to this recent stretch, though. Kansas City opened the game with a touchdown just once across six games following a 7-2 start.
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