New England Patriots: an early scouting report on the Kansas City Chiefs

The New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs will lock horns again in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, January 20, at 6:40 pm EST on CBS.

The first time the Patriots and Chiefs met this season, their head-to-head primetime heavyweight bout in Week 6 delivered on all the pregame hype and excitement, serving up an instant classic that placed top-three in a list of the year’s best games. Football fans left craving an encore after that game will now finally get their wish, as the two best teams in the AFC are set to collide once again on Sunday in the conference championship.

If the Chiefs win, they will advance to their first Super Bowl since 1970. Kansas City lost the first-ever Super Bowl to Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, before returning three years later to beat the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. Since then, however, the Chiefs’ playoff history has been a long, barren exercise in futility and broken dreams.

If the Patriots win, they will advance to their third straight Super Bowl, and their fourth in the past five years. Overall, New England has now played in 10 Super Bowls and won five out of eight under Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

Truly, these two teams have been defined by their success in different eras.

The Chiefs were the dominant AFL team before the merger, and even afterward, continued to represent the best the AFC had to offer. During that same time span (1960s and 1970s), the Patriots were one of the AFL/AFC’s bottom-dwellers, and things didn’t get much better for the franchise until the arrivals of Bill Parcells, Pete Carroll, and especially Bill Belichick at the turn of the millennium.

In present day, the Patriots are not only the gold standard of the AFC – they’re the gold standard of the NFL as a whole. No other team has been able to replicate their degree of sustained success – a mark that is all the more-impressive when figuring in modern-day salary cap limitations and free agency.

Indeed, Sunday’s game is almost symbolic in a way: the Chiefs have had one of their best seasons in years, and appear to have finally found their franchise quarterback in uber-talented wunderkind Patrick Mahomes. But in order to complete their ascension, they’ll need to beat the very best the NFL has to offer in Belichick and the Patriots.

Mahomes, specifically, may be called on to out-duel the greatest quarterback (player?) of all time. In the first meeting between these teams, the Patriots raced out to an 24-9 lead at intermission, before the Chiefs came storming back in the second half and turned the game into a bona fide shootout.

Belichick can certainly use the footage from that Week 6 contest as a teaching tool for his players and coaches, as there’s no doubt it provides a blueprint on how to beat the Chiefs. After all, the Patriots already did just that.

There are important variances though between that game and this one.

First of all, this game will be played in Kansas City, not Foxborough. That in and of itself may be the single greatest difference between what happened then and what might happen Sunday, and if so, it’s definitely advantage Chiefs.

K.C. enjoys arguably the best homefield advantage in all the NFL; plus, Brady and the Patriots have shown a historic tendency to fall apart at Arrowhead Stadium. Fans of both teams will not soon forget that it was the Chiefs’ demolition job of the Patriots in 2014 that sparked rumors of a quarterback controversy in New England, and started up all the talk of Brady’s retirement/decline.

Of course, Patriots fans will remind you that loss also served as the catalyst and rallying cry (“We’re on to Cincinnati”) that propelled the team all the way to a Super Bowl championship.

Besides just the change in scenery, the stakes are also dramatically different this time around. In Week 6, both teams left the field exhausted but hopeful – the Patriots because they’d finally notched a marquee win over a superior opponent, and the Chiefs because they’d proven their early season success wasn’t just a fluke after coming within a field goal of upsetting the champs on the road.

Both teams turned an eager eye to the future and had reasons for optimism. This time around, only one team will have that luxury, as the loser on Sunday will begin the offseason process of reflection and reassessment, while the winner starts packing their bags for Atlanta.

The Patriots have been here before – many, many times – so their experience and playoff know-how cannot be discounted. Yet they are only 3-4 in the postseason on the road under Belichick, which opens the door for a team as well-coached and dangerous as the Chiefs to perhaps negate that advantage.

The Chiefs finished the regular season with a better record than the Patriots, are playing at home, and are currently favored by a field goal. It’s not outlandish to say the Chiefs are a better team than the Patriots, or to predict that New England’s season will come to an end on Sunday.

Still, Pats fans should maintain hope. Their team is more balanced than the Chiefs offensively and defensively, and seems to have hit their stride just at the right time. New England looked mighty impressive in blowing out the Chargers last weekend – the same Chargers team that dealt Kansas City its only home loss this season.

We’ll get deeper into more specific matchups and statistics as the week goes on, but for now, it’s important to note that while this rematch may be very different from the original Week 6 showdown in a number of ways, it’s also probably going to be similarly epic and play out in thrilling, edge-of-your-seat fashion.

Better get the popcorn ready.