Divisional Round Checklist: Advantage Chiefs

Divisional Round Checklist: Advantage Chiefs – I’ve been a Kansas City Chiefs fan for a long time and been disappointed more times than I care to count. While I’ve been what you could call an eternal optimist — my father actually belonged to the Optimist Club — I have never felt as confident about the possibility that the Chiefs will win a playoff game as I am about this one coming up on Sunday in Arrowhead Stadium. I keep coming across information which makes me feel more and more sure of this feeling so I have created a checklist for you to consider.

1. Chiefs Safety Tyrann Mathieu played for the Houston Texans in 2018 and is totally familiar with their offense having seen it in practice every day… just one year ago. Knowing your opponents tendencies is tantamount to peeking inside their huddle. Now. Mathieu is already one of the best Safeties in the league and was voted an All-Pro Safety this season, but having him in the driver’s’ seat of the Chiefs defense during this game should make even the most anxious Chiefs fan sleep better tonight. Andy Reid on Tyrann Mathieu:

“Before that I was with Brian Dawkins. I’ve been lucky to be around some really good safeties. They’re all different in their own way but they’re all great football players with great instincts and good leaders. They lead a different way. This kid here, he’s a special kid. He’s not the biggest guy. You’re not looking at one of those huge safeties but, man, is he a good football player. He just gets it.”

Steve Spagnuolo on Tyrann Mathieu:

“He’s the glue. He’s the guy that can get in the huddle in practice and say, ‘Hey, we need to step it up.’ You need guys like that. That stuff, I value as a coordinator. It makes my job a lot easier.”

Tyrann Mathieu on Leadership:

“The first thing with leadership is you have to understand your surroundings, your environment and the kind of people you’re dealing with day to day. Here we had such a young team, such a vibrant team with a lot of different personalities…. I feel I can go into any locker room and fit in for the most part, really relate to the most of the guys in the locker room.”

2. 85% of the Divisional Round HOME teams have won their games over the past 5 years. When the odds are with you, it’s hard to bet against those odds. While the Chiefs haven’t been the best HOME team, relying upon the tendencies of all other Divisional participants over the past 5 seasons should help to comfort and soothe:

The eventual Super Bowl winner each year has a yellow rectangle around their name.

3. Of the 7 participants, and their head coaches, who made the Super Bowl over the past 5 seasons, only the Seahawks are left in these playoffs:

A. Patriots

B. Seahawks

C. Panthers

D. Broncos

E. Falcons

F. Eagles

G. Rams

Of the coaches to make it to the Divisional round, only Seattle’s Pete Carroll and Baltimore’s John Harbaugh have won the Super Bowl. Andy Reid has been to the big dance but not broken through yet. Carroll was there 5 years ago and Harbaugh was there 7 years ago while Reid hasn’t been to the Super Bowl in 15 years. Aside from Reid, Carroll and Harbaugh, the 5 other coaches in the Divisional rounds have 18 years of experience… including very little playoff experience:

Mike Vrabel: 2 years

Bill O’Brien: 6 years

Kyle Shanahan: 3 years

Matt LaFleur: 1 year

Mike Zimmer: 6 years…

This just means that the Chiefs are as good a bet as any other team in the playoffs right now (to win it all) based upon the experience of the head coaches and their rosters. Andy Reid is 4-and-1 in the Divisional Round so this week’s game should be a win. 😍

4. Run stopping DT Mike Pennel was signed on October 19, the week after the Chiefs played the Texans in Week 6.

During the 2019 Regular season DT Mike Pennel has played in 8 games with 24 combo tackles. To appropriately compare those stats let’s look at DT Dontari Poe’s best season as far as tackles are concerned and that would be 2013 when he had 51 combo tackles in 15 games.

However: Poe played on 975 defensive snaps that season while in 2019 Mike Pennel played in 156 snaps.

If you double Pennel’s production numbers he’d have 16 games and 48 tackles in 312 snaps. IOW… Pennel has produced three times as many tackles as Poe did in his best season… on average (approximately).

The point is… the Chiefs have been much better up the middle on run defense because of Mike Pennel. While much has been made of Pennel’s impact vs the run there are many different factors leading to the Chiefs improvement in the second half of the 2019 season.

5. The defensive improvement are apparent vs the run and the pass. In the first half of the 2019 season (games 1-through-8) the Chiefs defense allowed 256.5 passing yards per game. In the second half of the 2019 season, the defense allowed only 197.9 passing yards.

If the Chiefs would have allowed an average of 197.9 passing yards per game they would have finished with the 5th best passing defense in the NFL. As things stand at the end of 2019, the Chiefs passing defense is 7th in the league in points allowed per game at 19.2 ppg… plus they finished #8 in the league in passing ypg.

The Chiefs defense has allowed 145 rushing yards per game in the first half of the 2019 season while improving and then only allowing 111 PPG in the second half.

The Chiefs finished 26th in the league allowing 128.2 YPG in 2019. By cutting that down to 111 rushing YPG over the last 8 games — if they had averaged that all year long — they would have finished 16th in the league. Only the Vikings defense, and the Ravens defense, have finished with a better points per game allowed, of all the teams still in these playoffs.

6. Brendan Daly quote: “A violently executed plan is better than a perfectly executed plan.” No matter who said it… I love that the Chiefs DL Coach tells the Chiefs players to execute this way:

7. Patrick Mahomes second year performance as a starter:

I heard something today which made me fall in like with Patrick Mahomes all over again: on the day of the 2017 draft, he only had one cap, a Chiefs cap, to put on, once he was drafted.

There’s a little checklist of the advantages the Chiefs have entering the Divisional Round this coming Sunday vs. the Texans in Arrowhead Stadium at 2:05 PM CST. Can you just not hardly wait!

Laddie Morse — ArrowheadOne

If you are viewing this in Apple News and would like to join the Discussion, [GO HERE.](http://arrowheadone.com/divisional-round-checklist-advantage-chiefs/#disqus_thread)