Kansas City Chiefs: Report Card vs Denver Broncos in Week 17
The Kansas City Chiefs had a memorable New Year’s Eve in the Mile High City, knocking off the Broncos by a score of 27-24. It was also the debut of rookie quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
The 2017 regular season has come to a close and the Kansas City Chiefs finished the year with four straight wins. They went 10-6 on the season and had all kinds of ups and downs throughout their 2017 campaign.
The Chiefs clinched the AFC West title last week when they defeated the Miami Dolphins and therefore didn’t have much to gain from their regular season finale. That meant it was basically time for all of the backups to play in Denver.
Most notably, rookie quarterback Patrick Mahomes got the start in Denver, his first glimpse of NFL action. We’ll get to more on Mahomes in a bit, but first let’s dive into the regular season finale report card!
B. . . . RUN DEFENSE
Considering that the Chiefs were playing mostly backups this week didn’t instill much confidence for the fans that they’d leave Denver with a victory. Instead, however, the backups played decently, and the run defense can certainly be grouped in with that.
The last time these two teams played, the Broncos gashed the Chiefs in the run game and had they figured that out sooner, it’s doubtful that Kansas City would have won that night at Arrowhead. Nearly three months later, however, and the run defense improved significantly.
C.J. Anderson has had a nice year, but he had just 61 yards on 14 carries. In total, the defense gave up 110 rushing yards on the ground. With Derrick Henry coming to town next week, let’s hope the Chiefs can put up another nice day when it comes to stopping the run.