Rice has sort of become the current “celebrity” of the moment. Problem is, even the Raiders have figured it out, too. Want to beat the Chiefs? Blanket Kelce and Rice with defenders in the secondary, play downhill towards the run. Rice is the only one of the WR corps that is improving, but it comes with a really bad caveat. He’s really prone to coughing up a ball right after a catch. And other teams know it.

Which brings me to my next point. We’ve handed to many of these games over to our opponents. Way too many dumb passes that resulted in interceptions, way too many fumbles when WR’s were thinking about their touchdown dance moves before catching the ball. Most of our losses were self-inflicted this year. Their offense couldn’t score against this D on a long field. But they obviously can when we hand them a short one.

The penalties are always an issue. It’s the dumb ones that sting. Toney’s offsides penalty was horrible, made everyone almost forget about the one Dee Ford made. #74 seems to have turned himself into a ref favorite, but in his defense he’s responsible for protecting a $500mil investment in PM2.

Speaking of flags, there’s one thing PM does that I wish would stop. Throwing a pass just to get a flag. There’s way too many times that Mahomes will throw in the area of a guy he sees being held, and instantly point right after the ball is thrown. Sometimes it works, we get the flag our way, but think what’s going on is that the refs are getting fed up with it, and it’s coming back to bite us in the butt (For example, the no-call on DPI against MVS). It also wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find out we had another person wide open when this happens.