Spreadsheet Playoffs: Texans

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

Patrick Mahomes has been the starter in Kansas City for seven years. Every single one of those years, the Chiefs have gone to the AFC Championship Game. That is an unbelievable stat. Only the Patriots have a longer streak of championship games (eight), but it was not at the start of Brady’s career, like it is for Mahomes.

The Chiefs beat the Texans for the second time this year. It was not the prettiest game I’ve seen the Chiefs play. I am not a film guy, but watching it, our offensive line got bodied for much of the game, our run game was completely non-existent, and our defense felt like it was struggling for awhile, before Spags flipped the switch and just crushed every iota of hope the Texans had in that second half.

The Chiefs won this game by 9 points. On their final drive of the day, they kneeled down three times to burn time and timeouts, then lined up to punt it away, and the punter, Matt Araiza, scrambled with it for a few seconds before deliberately taking a safety. I did not see any comments from Reid about why they did that, so I can only speculate that it was to remove any possibility of a blocked punt turning into a quick touchdown for the Texans. After the safety, they got a free kick from the 20 yard line, and the Texans just kneeled it out and ended the game.

That means the Chiefs only really had 7 drives, not 8. That puts their points per drive at 3.3 instead of 2.9 the graphic above says. That is not the only stat the safety messed up for this graphic either. My code is somehow attributing the safety as a scoring drive for the Chiefs. The Chiefs only had 5 scoring drives out of their 7 real drives. 7 drives is an insanely low number, by the way.