[Megatron96]

It's never just one thing.

We didn't lose just because of one unit, or one play, or one player brainfart, or one dropped pass, or whatever. It doesn't work like that at the NFL level.

The Chiefs were outplayed and ultimately outscored for several reasons. But I'm just going to talk briefly about one of them.

And I'm just using this example because it's a less complex issue not because it had any more to do with why KC lost than any other reason.

The Chiefs do not have a true WR1.

And CIN has two in Chase and Higgins (Higgins is ranked 10th among WRs in total yards/Chase is currently ranked 21st, but he missed a handful of games and should be ranked in the top-5 as we know).

The Chiefs have ZERO WRs ranked in the top-20. Travis is the only KC receiver ranked in the top-20. JuJu is 24th (I know he missed some time, but I doubt it would've moved him up more than a few places).

Our receivers are new to the system, as well as a rookie trying to get up to speed still, but that's not the whole story. None of our WRs yesterday are ever going to be true WR1s. There's just a talent-level these guys aren't going to reach.

And yesterday that difference in the time it took for any of them to get open, to make the tough catches, to run cleaner routes, make the more nuanced reads, etc., cost KC a certain amount of efficiency.

So, while KC's WRs struggled to get open throughout most of the game, the Bengals' WRs did not much more often. That allowed their offense to play a certain way, their defense to play a more conservative scheme, while ours had to try and manufacture pressure and try to use more deception.

Personally, I thought that the 13 personnel was going to be a lot more effective than it was, and more precisely I thought 13P would make up for the lack of a true WR1 more than it did or has this season. I actually thought that was part of the plan this season.

And so on. This is part of what happens when you're tight against the cap every season. It's why i likened the 2022 Chiefs to the 2019 St. Louis Blues in some respects earlier this season. A team that wasn't the most talented but made the most of every opportunity and played above themselves in the most critical moments, which led to a championship, in spite of the obvious lack of talent in certain areas.

And the Chiefs are not the most talented team in the league, but through a lot of hard work from the players and the coaching staff, they've made themselves into a top scoring, fairly complete playoff-bound team with a legitimate shot at winning the SB.

But the margins within the AFC have shrunk considerably in the last couple years with the rise of Josh Allen and BUF, and now Joe Burrow and CIN as well. And both of those teams have elite WRs as well as elite QBs to lean on.

And there's only so much that scheming and game-planning can account for in the NFL. And to be fair, Andy and his staff are so good at it that they win about 80% of the games they play, year in and year out. But when you run into the very best teams, that have both great coaching and great players, sometimes no amount of great scheming is going to overcome that extra level or two of just pure ability. That's just the way it is.

To win with this team, they're going to have to work harder than any other team in the league, be smarter than any other, and ultimately, they're going to have to play above their limitations if they want to win it all.

And the thing is, we've seen them do it before this season. They've beaten how many top-5 defenses? Beat some of the best defensive talent in the league over and over? They didn't get it done yesterday, but they have done it, and they can do it again in the playoffs.

There's just a lot less room for error these days.