KC Chiefs: Free agent acquisitions made huge difference in title game
The KC Chiefs are off to Miami for Super Bowl LIV and they have several free agent acquisitions to help thank for the trip to South Beach.
When the 2018 season wrapped up, the Kansas City Chiefs had come oh so close to a Super Bowl appearance, which would have been their first in 49 years. Instead, they watched the Patriots win the Lamar Hunt Trophy on their turf and then go on to win the Super Bowl for the billionth time.
It would have been easy for Brett Veach to have sat back and said, “Well, we got this far with the players we have – Let’s just roll out the team same team again next year”. Veach took a different approach, however, and it was the right approach.
Instead of keeping Eric Berry and Justin Houston around for another year when neither were worth their expensive contracts anymore and instead of paying Dee Ford a large sum of money, Veach decided to tear the defense down and rebuild it from the ground up. He parted ways with Berry and Houston (and for what it’s worth – Berry spent the 2019 season out of football) and traded Ford to San Francisco for some draft picks.
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To fill Ford’s place, Veach traded a first round pick to Seattle for Frank Clark to be the other premier pass rusher in Kansas City, alongside Chris Jones of course. He also brought in Tyrann Mathieu to help out in the secondary and the turnover in the secondary has been unreal.
The Chiefs needed these guys to step up and to prove that Veach knew what he was doing. It took awhile for this defense to gel, but we’ve seen the improvements and they showed up big time in the AFC Championship Game last weekend.
Mathieu led the team in tackles with nine with one being for loss. He also had a pass defensed in the title game. Clark had four tackles, but the biggest moment for him came in the final minute when he sacked
on fourth down to give the Chiefs the win and send them to the Super Bowl.
Guys like Damien Wilson, Bashaud Breeland, and Mike Pennel did their part too with Wilson having seven tackles, Breeland having a pass defensed while holding his own against Tennessee’s receivers, and Pennel had four tackles to go along with his run stopping abilities (and kept Derrick Henry in check!).
Veach took a gamble when he decided to tear it all down and build the defense up from scratch, but his moves paid off and they paid off on the biggest stage of the season so far. The Chiefs needed these guys to get to the Super Bowl and guess what? They’re in the Super Bowl now.