With COVID cases, Chiefs will play short-handed Sunday. The long-term is a concern too
The deep shell saturated the Chiefs offense for weeks, turning a supernatural quarterback into something more human. A historically-bad defensive start plagued them for longer, a potential kryptonite to their Super Bowl aspirations.
At long last, though, 15 weeks into the season, the Chiefs have both units playing with cohesion, and with the postseason less than one month away, what better timing?
Except, wouldn’t you know it, an entirely different kind of opponent has emerged, this one more unpredictable, more elusive and perhaps a more difficult trend to reverse than its predecessors.
COVID-19.
The greatest disruption of the 2020 season is back one year later. It never actually left, but as the omicron variant spreads across the world and the country, NFL locker rooms have proven they are not immune. The Chiefs’ facility, as it turns out, is fertile ground for the virus. The team has placed 14 players from the active roster on the NFL’s reserve/COVID-19 list in the past two weeks, including 11 this week alone.
Some players have since returned to practice. The Chiefs have been stuck in a waiting game all week wondering which others might join them — they learned Saturday that Tyreek Hill has cleared COVID-19 protocols, for example — leaving coaches to juggle numbers on play sheets as they attempt to game plan for who might be available Sunday when they play the Steelers.
And that should be their focus. That’s the preparation technique that has placed the Chiefs on the verge of a sixth straight AFC West title — all eyes on the game ahead.
But these circumstances require a coupled broader outlook, a step back from the one-game-at-a-time mantra. The playoffs are knocking on the door just as omicron is bursting through it.
A team trying to reach a third straight Super Bowl prepared to play a Week 15 game without Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce — because that’s how it long looked. Can you imagine if this were AFC Championship week? And who says the same problem wouldn’t exist then? This virus does not care about the timing of the NFL season. It holds no bias over which locker room it penetrates.
It’s here.
Aside from the more important health issues at stake with COVID-19, it could return to the Chiefs at the most inopportune time.
The playoffs.
“We’re prepared if that happens,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “You can’t predict it. We went this long without it, and now we’re working through it. You see different teams go through these stretches where that happens. That’s kind of where we’re at. I don’t know what’s going to happen going forward.”
Nobody does. That’’s the point. We cannot predict the unpredictable. A coach who has made a career of controlling what he can control is now faced with something much less controllable — to an extent.
The NFL is requiring stricter guidelines inside team facilities to stave off the rapid spread of infections — things such as socially-distanced meetings and mask mandates, to name a couple — and the Chiefs have turned those directives over to Rick Burkholder, their vice president of sports medicine and performance, for implementation.
In 2020, though, a season completed before vaccines, the Chiefs went a step further, asking players to limit their contact with the outside world even after they left work.
Today, those are just requests. For now.
“I think guys are making the best decisions for themselves and the team and their family,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “At the end of the day, we don’t want to tell anyone to live in a bubble. We want people to live their lives still (and) at the same time try to protect themselves, protect others and do whatever they can to take the precautions to be able to play on Sundays.”
They soon might not have the option of both. It might come down to either/or. The virus will speak loudest and hold the final word.
Mahomes walked onto the practice field Wednesday without his top two receivers. Since taking over as the team’s starting quarterback in 2018, he’s not once played a game without Kelce as his safety valve. Do the Chiefs win last week without Kelce?
Can they win a postseason game without a few key players, should it come to that? Do they want to risk it?
The next two weekends encompass holidays. A time reserved for family. Some players are already altering their plans. They want fewer chances of exposure to the virus.
“Making sure that you’re taking precaution with family coming in,” defensive end Frank Clark said. “Understanding that you may want to see those family members you haven’t seen in a minute, but also you have a job; you have a responsibility to another 100 people where you work, and they trust that you’ve done everything in your power (to stay safe). So it’s just having accountability for one’s self.”
Every team will face these same dilemmas, these same lines of questions, but not every team has the Super Bowl potential as the one that resides in Kansas City.
The stakes are higher here. A year ago, the Chiefs’ Super Bowl week included a COVID-19 scare when a team barber tested positive after having provided cuts for several players. He apparently stopped mid-haircut with offensive lineman Daniel Kilgore, prompting a funny Twitter meme.
They got off easy.
It would appear that won’t be the case this week, in Week 15 of the regular season. And that’s a warning shot, of sorts, for the games of greater significance that rest ahead.
“Obviously this week we’ve had a couple people test positive. That’s part of it. That’s part of the world that we live in today,” Mahomes said. “Guys have done a good job so far of trying to keep themselves away from people, but at the end of the day, COVID can hit anyone. I think you’re seeing that.
“All we can do is have guys step up. We have a lot of great guys in this locker room. I have the full trust in them that they can get the job done.”
This story was originally published December 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "With COVID cases, Chiefs will play short-handed Sunday. The long-term is a concern too."