Vahe Gregorian: How Christmas night loss to Broncos epitomizes a Chiefs team in limbo

Vahe Gregorian, The Kansas City Star on Dec 26, 2025

Published in Football

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Nearing kickoff on Christmas night, thick fog hovered over and around GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. And it made for an appropriately murky backdrop for a franchise abruptly at a crossroads — and in more ways than just the franchise’s planned move to Kansas in 2031.

Because after a dynastic run forged with remarkable continuity, flux so rules the present that it’s hard to know if this season is a blip and not the start of a prevailing trend.

At least as it stands now, heck, there’s suddenly more certainty about the Chiefs moving five years from now than how they’re going to fare in between now and then.

“We’ll be back,” defensive tackle Chris Jones said. “This year taught us a lot of valuable lessons as a team. We’re going to continue to build off of that.”

Maybe so.

Maybe even probably so.

No matter how earnest the sentiment, though, the refrain rings hollow just now.

In part because it sounds a lot like words we heard all season that never quite seemed to take hold.

And in part because there are a lot of reasons the Chiefs have careened from appearing in five of the last six Super Bowls — and winning three — to a 6-10 team following their fifth straight defeat: a 20-13 loss to the Denver Broncos on Thursday night.

Nothing resonates more than the season-ending knee injury to Patrick Mahomes earlier this month, of course, and the ravaged offensive line has been part of the fall.

But it still was telling in its own way that the Chiefs lost yet another one-score game marked by a crucial late-game mistake by Jones, who jumped offside with the Broncos facing fourth-and-2 on the Chiefs’ 9-yard-line just after the 2-minute warning.

And revealing, even with inexperienced Chris Oladokun at quarterback, that the Chiefs mustered only 139 yards of offense a week after managing just 133 against Tennessee.

Something seems to have shifted in the very DNA of a veteran group that had won 17 of those one-score games in a row entering this season only to drop all eight such games this time around.

And, simply put, the offense has gone stale — something evident even when Mahomes was playing.

After finishing 15th in scoring each of the last two seasons, the Chiefs entered Sunday 20th and are likely to dip further after they mercifully end this season next weekend in Las Vegas.

This, with a head coach in Andy Reid widely understood to be an offensive genius.

Put it all together, and it’s gone from an enthralling time to follow the Chiefs to a puzzling one.

A state of limbo, even, as Mahomes is just beginning the arduous process of rehabilitating a major knee injury. While the timeline for his return figures to be by early next season, returning at full capacity could be another matter.

But the future really is more about what’s around Mahomes to avoid squandering any more of his transformative talent. He’s still only 30 years old, but age has a way of accelerating and reminding us all how fleeting time really is.

Speaking of which, then there’s the matter of Travis Kelce, the future Pro Football Hall of Famer who is in the last year of his current contract. Kelce had five catches for 36 yards in what may have been his last home game, but after it was over, he remained elusive on the topic of his future.

“The game loves and needs (Kelce),” Oladokun said afterward.

Certainly, the Chiefs and their fans have.

Now, though, he’s just part of the puzzle and mystery of their future.

And the uncertainty of it all, especially amid a seismic shift in locale ahead, made for an unsettling vibe on Thursday … and surely into the offseason.

Whether or not Kelce returns, this much is clear: This is a column or a project in itself down the road, but the Chiefs aren’t going to return to prominence with just some spackling-over of their issues.

Suffice to say for now that it’s going to take a reboot with fresh ideas and voices and some churning of the roster, isn’t it?

Or the recent past that we can appreciate all the more this season is going to fade into the mist of history.