SAN DIEGO — There will be no mention of the final score. Honestly, once the San Diego Chargers eclipsed 30, I quit counting. It no longer mattered.
The Chiefs showed their immaturity on Sunday. Winners of two straight and coming off a shocking upset of the defending Super Bowl champions, the Chiefs made the mistake of believing their triumph over Pittsburgh mattered on the West Coast.
Now they know better. Now they realize an opportunistic victory over a good team only means the next good team won’t overlook you.
Beating the Steelers got the Chargers’ attention. Philip Rivers, Antonio Gates, LaDainian Tomlinson and the rest of the AFC West-leading Chargers gave Kansas City their A game. The Chiefs countered with an F-fort that had head coach Todd Haley regretting the Thanksgiving vacation he gave his team.
The Chiefs turned the ball over four times. Quarterback Matt Cassel dropped a pick-6 fumble into the gut of a blitzing San Diego defensive back. Running back Jamaal Charles coughed up a fumble when the game was still close. Cassel tossed an interception. There’s another turnover that I can’t remember at the moment. Oh, that’s right. Center Rudy Niswanger zinged a shotgun snap over the head of Cassel.
On the defensive side, KC surrendered big play after big play.
Gates got open whenever he wanted. Rivers flicked the ball to streaking receivers whenever he wanted. Tomlinson rumbled into the end zone twice.
Let’s deal with the obvious. The Chiefs are not as bad as they looked on Sunday. San Diego is not 29 points better than the Chiefs.
The Chiefs came out feeling a touch too good about themselves, a little loosey-goosey, and the Chargers slapped them into reality.
I’m not going to overreact. I told you before the game the final score was irrelevant.
Did I expect a disaster? No.
I didn’t think a fortunate, everything-went-right victory over the Steelers would cause a 3-and-whatever team to relax. I didn’t even disagree with Haley’s decision to take Thanksgiving off.
But it’s quite obvious no one handled last week’s success well.
Haley and his team exhaled. Getting three victories from this off-the-street team was the mission.
Well, getting blasted by the Chargers should give Haley and Co. a new goal. They have to erase the memory of this loss. They need to legitimize the Pittsburgh victory all over again. It looks rather fluky now.
We’d have to agree that Matt Cassel regressed, right? He completed 19 of 31 passes for 178 yards, one TD, one INT and the ridiculous fumble. I’m not bailing on the guy. But it wasn’t a good look Sunday. He did nothing to right the ship.
Kansas City’s immature performance is a reflection of Cassel and Haley’s leadership. When the turnovers started flying, it would’ve been the right time for Haley and/or Cassel to gather the troops and demand the proper attention to detail.
Didn’t happen. The offensive trouble just snowballed.
Yep, this mostly falls on the offense. There were so many turnovers and they came so quick that the Chiefs’ defense had no chance to mount a proper response. The Chargers scored 21 points in the second quarter.
One minute the Chiefs were driving toward a game-tying, second touchdown and the next minute it was halftime, and the Chiefs trailed 28-7.
“There’s a lot of reasons this game wasn’t close,” Niswanger said when I asked him if he and his teammates were overconfident. “I’m sure that’s probably one of the reasons. But when a game isn’t close, there’s a lot more reasons than just one.” Very true.
However, it’s hard for me to evaluate what happened on the defensive side. When a team dependent on the blitz gets down two or three scores, it becomes nearly impossible for a defensive coordinator to call plays. The Chiefs did a decent job against San Diego’s running game. Unfortunately, they still had to respect San Diego’s running game because of the score.
The best thing we can do is forget about Sunday’s game. Pretend it didn’t happen. And we might as well pretend the Pittsburgh game didn’t happen either.
The Chiefs have five games left to tell us what to think about this season. They can lose all five and we can still feel good about the season. But they’ll need a more mature effort than what they gave on Sunday.
——— (c) 2009, The Kansas City Star.
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