Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes faced his locker with a towel over his head, looking down as he scrolled through his phone.
In a season full of disappointments for the Chiefs, this scene — after the team’s Nov. 16 road loss at Denver — was among the most telling:
A franchise icon, just like the team around him, trying to make sense of circumstances so unfamiliar.
On this afternoon, Mahomes had a chance to win it for his team in the exact situations in which he’d previously delivered in Super Bowls. Tied at 19, the Chiefs got the ball back with four minutes left, with the chance to march for a game-winning field goal.
Instead … incompletion, incompletion, sack. Mahomes would never see the ball again as the Broncos followed with their own game-sealing drive in a 22-19 win.
A few minutes later, at his postgame news conference, Mahomes spoke about what bothered him most.
“Just having an opportunity at the end of the game,” Mahomes said, “and not coming through.”
Really, the sentence ended up defining the 2025 Chiefs.
They’d entered the year with recent success nearly unmatched in NFL history. That included winning three of the last six Super Bowls while appearing in five of them, while also reaching the AFC Championship Game for seven consecutive seasons.
You don’t reach those heights without feeling some aura of invincibility.
And with Mahomes, this always seemed inevitable: If the Chiefs were in a close game, he was going to make the plays needed to break an opponent’s heart.
It’s why the narrative turn in the 2025 season was so stunning.
This was the year Kansas City lost its magic pixie dust … while ultimately scuffling to a 6-11 finish.
After a campaign in which they went 12-0 in one-score games to help secure a Super Bowl berth, the Chiefs went 1-9 in those same situations this year. Suddenly, a team that had thrived on doing all it could to put away games late was doing everything in its power to give wins away.
“It’s been a crazy year. A weird year,” Chiefs special teams coach Dave Toub said. “Just didn’t make plays, it seemed like. We just couldn’t get a game where we made plays to win the game.”
The Chiefs, who prided themselves in previous years on playing “complementary” football, suffered through a season in which the offense, defense and special teams each grabbed the baton as the most responsible party for losses.
And, in the aftermath, these were Chiefs coaches’ biggest regrets following a season gone awry.
Injuries, mistakes sink offense
Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy believes the team’s offensive season can be summarized in one word: inconsistencies.
There were certainly highlights. Once receiver Rashee Rice returned from a six-game suspension, the Chiefs offense looked nearly unstoppable at times in the middle of the season, which included home blowout wins over the Las Vegas Raiders and Washington Commanders.
“We really felt like we were at a peak level offensively,” Nagy said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t last the whole way through the year.”
Through a 6-6 start, the Chiefs rose all the way up to second in expected points added per play, per TruMedia’s stats.
That, however, was around the time significant injuries started to hit.
The Chiefs lost both starting tackles, Josh Simmons and Jawaan Taylor, in Week 13 against the Dallas Cowboys; neither played another snap after that. Backups Jaylon Moore and Wanya Morris suffered setbacks in subsequent weeks, pushing the Chiefs down to their last options at tackle on the depth chart.
K.C.’s offense never recovered. The team labored in home losses to Houston and the Los Angeles Chargers, with Mahomes ultimately suffering a season-ending ACL injury in the fourth quarter of that setback against the Chargers.
The Chiefs offense still wasn’t perfect at full strength. For example, it ranked last in the NFL with just three 20-plus-yard runs — and only one of those came from a running back.
“Somewhere, you’d like to have a few bigger plays in that area,” coach Andy Reid said. “Not 3-4 yards. Every once in a while, you need to hit on a few.”
A possible touchdown pass to Travis Kelce turned into an interception for Eagles safety Andrew Mukuba in Week 2. (Jay Biggerstaff / Imagn Images)
The Chiefs also had stretches of unclutchness. Tight end Travis Kelce, for instance, deflected a red zone pass to a Philadelphia defender for the biggest play in a Week 2 loss to the Eagles. Mahomes threw a red zone interception that went 99 yards the other way for the biggest swing of a Week 5 road defeat to the Jaguars that the Chiefs dominated statistically.
Then there was the aforementioned Broncos game, when K.C. and Mahomes went backward on the game’s biggest drive.
In the end, Reid believed the Chiefs offense struggled most with penalties and turnovers in critical situations, along with a short-term, costly bout of receiver drops.
“You’re still looking at an offense that was one of the top 10 offenses in the league, if you take everything into consideration there. So you’re not that far off,” Reid said. “You’ve got to get a couple things bouncing your way and make sure you take care of that.”
Defense loses its clutch touch
When reflecting on this season, Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo says he’ll lament one part of it most.
“There was some end-of-the-game defense that I would’ve liked to have back,” Spagnuolo said. “If we could’ve found a way to make one play toward the end of the game … that, more than anything, sticks out. If we can get better at that, I’d be happy.”
Though it played a significant role in the Chiefs’ losses, that facet remains a bit of an enigma to fix.
A season ago, K.C. played its best in these moments. Chiefs linebacker and team leader Nick Bolton remembered taking pride in the fact that the defense seemed to rise up on snaps that mattered most.
“We were really good at end-of-game situations in all of my years prior,” Bolton said. “This year, just couldn’t get it done.”
This was most evident early as the Chiefs started dropping close games.
The Chiefs defense failed to deliver in big moments of close games this season, including in a Thanksgiving Day loss to George Pickens and the Cowboys. (Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
In fact, the K.C. defense began as one of the most unclutch teams of all time. In specific close scenarios — score within 8 points either way, drives that started in the final five minutes of regulation, only non-kneeldown third- and fourth-down snaps — the Chiefs defense surrendered the following stats in their first 10 games:
• Six opponent first downs on seven attempts
• 4-for-4 passing for 69 yards
• Opponent conversions on a third-and-15, a third-and-14 and two third-and-7s
Spagnuolo specifically singled out his team’s struggles on third-and-long, which he believed played a significant part in the team’s final record.
“We’ve always been really good at that,” Spagnuolo said, “and for whatever reason, it bit us in the butt this year.”
The Chiefs had a few other issues in what was otherwise a solid year for the defense (the defense improved its EPA-per-play rank from 15th last season to 12th).
One constant problem was pass rush. The Chiefs finished tied for 22nd with 35 sacks as they failed to get consistent contributions from anyone besides All-Pro tackle Chris Jones. Spagnuolo has also made a name for himself in the past by scheming up free rushers on blitzes, though those didn’t seem to hit nearly as often this year either.
K.C. also lagged in turnovers, tying for 26th with 14 takeaways. Though the Chiefs had numerous instances in which they tipped passes or stripped the ball, they rarely seemed to come away with possession.
Spagnuolo remained proud that he saw some “really good stretches of defense” from his guys. That included a must-win game against the Indianapolis Colts when the Chiefs defense strung together four consecutive three-and-outs.
That type of big-moment success was more the exception than the rule, however, in a Chiefs defensive season defined by letdowns in late, game-changing moments.
“It seemed that they’d make a play,” Spagnuolo said of the opponent, “or we’d make a mistake.”
Special teams ‘not good enough’
Toub’s special teams units have historically been a reason the Chiefs have come through in close games.
That wasn’t the case in 2025.
The season started strong. Just before halftime in Game 1, the Chiefs perfectly executed a fire-drill field goal attempt with no timeouts left, as kicker Harrison Butker rushed onto the field to knock through a 59-yard field goal just before time expired.
It wasn’t a sign of things to come.
Butker, who entered the season as one of the NFL’s top kickers, missed five kicks over his next seven halves of football.
“That was like a Debbie Downer right there,” Toub said of Butker’s inaccuracy over the first month.
The Chiefs’ special teams also never swung the field with a return for a touchdown. In a season when the team knew kickoffs would become more valuable because of touchback rule changes, the Chiefs were behind the curve on kickoff placement and freeing up their returners in the open field.
Toub acknowledged that the team’s kickoff return game, in particular, was “not where I wanted it to be” while ranking in the 20s of his own statistical rankings.
“That’s just not good enough,” Toub said. “We have to do a better job of getting some bigger returns.”
Hope for the future
The Chiefs had made the playoffs 10 straight years before this — the second-longest streak in NFL history.
Naturally, Nagy said, that reality led to a “weird” and “different” feeling around the Chiefs’ offices during this losing campaign.
“You feel like you let people down,” Nagy said. “That sucks.”
Nagy, though, says he can only choose to view the outcome through a positive lens.
He remembers two years ago, when the Chiefs were embarrassed by the Las Vegas Raiders at home on Christmas Day. That defeat stung at the time, but it also brought about real change in the Chiefs, who went on to win all their games after that on their way to a Super Bowl LVIII title.
Nagy says until the day he dies, he’ll tell people that the loss to the Raiders was necessary for the Chiefs to move forward.
And he chooses to see this year’s difficulties in the same way.
“It didn’t happen this year for the Chiefs, for the city, for the organization, but sometimes, everything in life happens for a reason,” Nagy said. “When we’re in the storm right now, you can’t accept it, and you don’t like it. But a year or two, three years down the road, you’re like, ‘Maybe that really did happen (for a reason).’”
The Chiefs’ late-season losses will help them restock. K.C. will have the ninth pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, a rare luxury for a team that hasn’t picked in the top 10 since it traded up for Mahomes in 2017.
Meanwhile, Reid said he’ll take part in “intense evaluation” to ensure the Chiefs right their wrongs from a season no one saw coming.
“We look forward to getting going here in this offseason,” Reid said, “and getting ourselves right.”
