Our Kansas City Chiefs finish their regular season schedule today against a Los Angeles Chargers team with nothing to play for and a vague, bleak future ahead of them. At the start of the season, this looked like it would be a big-time matchup with two legit Super Bowl contenders. What the hell happened?
Turnovers. A bunch of turnovers happened. Only six teams in football have fumbled more times this year than San Die-err, uhh, the Chargers. I will not apologize for liking that stupid joke too much. The NFL's top five worst totals for interceptions per team come from the Bucs, Panthers, Steelers, Browns and Chargers. The Steelers are using second-string and third-string QBs all season long. The Panthers have a 23 year-old backup QB in Kyle Allen that already started 12 games this season. And the Bucs have Jameis Winston. Add the struggling 24 year-old Baker Mayfield to this list and the weathered veteran Philip Rivers is a clear outlier.
Maybe it's reductive, but Rivers' lack of effectiveness this season really is their key issue. He's ruined his team's chances to be successful in a way that's only comparable to Jameis, Baker and a bunch of backups. That's a long way for an eight-time Pro Bowler to fall, especially when his team went 12-4 last year. It's a darn shame that L.A didn't plan ahead like a certain other team in their division and groom a talented young quarterback to take the reigns for them soon.
This is just another reminder that Patrick Mahomes is decades of Chiefs drafting mistakes corrected. Finally pulling the trigger on a quarterback early in the first round of the draft, and choosing that quarterback wisely, may have just led Chiefs Kingdom into a new decade of consistently contending for championships. Let's all remember and enjoy that today while Mahomes molly-whops these disheartened Chargers and finishes off the regular season in style.
Doug LaCerte writes last-second blog posts about local sports and neglects his Twitter and Facebook.
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