The Kansas City Chiefs’ Week 2 win over the Los Angeles Chargers was quite the slugfest on “Thursday Night Football.”
Buy Chiefs TicketsThe two teams were exchanging body blows all night long before the Chiefs’ defense ultimately dealt the knockout punch. Everyone expected a close game between two highly competitive AFC West rivals and that’s exactly what they got with a 27-24 win in favor of Kansas City. This is the type of performance that the Chiefs can build on and ride throughout the course of the 2022 NFL season.
Here were our six biggest takeaways from the victory over the Chargers at Arrowhead:
This specific Chiefs team can compete at the highest level
We learned a lot about this new Chiefs team on Thursday night. Not a lot was going right for this team early on and by the middle of the third quarter, they found themselves in a 10-point hole. They could’ve gotten down on themselves and let things get out of hand, but they didn’t. They showed resiliency to find a way in a game where there didn’t look like there would be one.
“I think it was something where we’ve had guys that have been in big games, so we know how to not let it overwhelm you,” Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes said following the game. “To not let the moment, when it’s not going well like just change it. I mean you get down 17-7 against a great football team like that, sometimes it can get away from you, but I think guys kept it in perspective. We scored when we needed to score. I’ll just keep reiterating. I’m so proud of those young guys on the defense, man. You just don’t know until you get in these situations. And some games like that where the offense played like we did today, because we didn’t play our best football, a lot of times we’d lose those games and for the defense to keep us around it’s a big, big step I think in the right direction.”
This step in the right direction came against a Chargers team that was tailor-made to defeat the Chiefs. The team did what they needed to do in order to comeback and win the game. It felt very much like those moments during the 2019 playoffs when the team was down, yet willed themselves to victory. It’s something they can build off of as they face adversity during the course of the season.
Jaylen Watson swung this game in favor of the Chiefs
No one had a bigger night for the Chiefs than the rookie cornerback out of Washington State. Watson’s 99-yard interception returned for a touchdown gave the Chiefs a 54% increase in win probability according to NFL Next Gen Stats. He almost singlehandedly wrapped this game up in a box for Kansas City with one play.
Jaylen Watson 99-yd Pick Six
The Chiefs win probability jumped from 31% to 85% as a result of Watson's pick six of Justin Herbert, a 54% increase, the biggest win probability swing on a pick six over the last three seasons.#LACvsKC | #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/OhOcIj05ns
— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) September 16, 2022
It wasn’t just the biggest probability swing in the last three seasons, it was also the longest go-ahead touchdown ever scored by a rookie in the fourth quarter in NFL history.
Jaylen Watson's 99-yard pick-6 is the longest go-ahead 4th-quarter TD scored by a rookie in NFL history #TNFonPrime #ChiefsKingdom
— NFL Research (@NFLResearch) September 16, 2022
Just a crazy display from the seventh-round draft pick in his first career start.
Clyde Edwards-Helaire continues to impress
Edwards-Helaire is off to a hot start during the 2022 NFL season. Not only did he thrive again in the passing game this week, but he ripped off the longest run of his NFL career on Thursday. He had four receptions on four targets for 44 yards in Week 2, including a long reception of 21 yards. He carried the ball eight times for 74 yards with a 52-yard scamper to help ice the game in the fourth quarter.
This is what everyone expected from Edwards-Helaire the past two seasons. Now that he’s actually healthy, he’s getting a shot to fully showcase his range of talents in both the passing game and the run game.
Chris Jones was insanely disruptive all day long
Jones had a good day in the box score and out of it too. He had three tackles, two sacks and a pass batted at the line of scrimmage. It wasn’t a day for the record books or anything like that, but his two sacks did help him move up to fifth all-time in franchise history in terms of sacks.
He certainly made large contributions to the winning effort. He was getting his hands up at key times, which forced Justin Herbert to hold onto the ball for an extra tick. He was commanding a lot of attention from the offensive line, which helped free up others to make some plays on Herbert.
The plays that Jones made really helped the team hang around and come back in the game. He only graded the defensive effort on Thursday as a B- and that’s probably a fair assessment, but he certainly deserves some credit in this victory.
There is still work to be done with the new receivers
Everything looked easy for Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes in Week 1 against the Cardinals. This week against a vaunted Chargers defense, things didn’t come so easy, especially with the arsenal of new receivers.
Marquez Valdes-Scantling was targeted seven times and only caught a pair of passes for 14 yards. JuJu Smith-Schuster caught three passes on three targets, but they only totaled ten yards. He didn’t seem to get any sort of downfield targets or even intermediate targets for that matter. Skyy Moore wasn’t even targeted during the course of the game.
If it wasn’t for Justin Watson’s 41-yard touchdown grab, I’m not sure a new receiver would have had an impactful game. It would’ve just been the Travis Kelce and Mecole Hardman show. All this says to me is that the Chiefs still have some work to do when it comes to figuring out how to best utilize their new receivers.
Justin Herbert and Patrick Mahomes are going to have some duels
The back-and-forth between Herbert and Mahomes in this game was really quite entertaining. These are two of the NFL’s best quarterbacks playing at the top of their game. Even when Herbert was banged up and getting hit, he came out firing and competing until the very end.
I expect that this isn’t going to be the last game that is like this for the Chiefs and Chargers signal-callers. These are going to be some heavyweight fights every time the two get on the field together in the future. Games like this will only fuel the drama too.
