Kansas City Chiefs: Four things to watch vs Raiders in Week 11

The Kansas City Chiefs play in Las Vegas for the first time ever this weekend. What should fans be watching for?

Sunday Night Football pits the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs against the Las Vegas Raiders. The Chiefs were on cruise control in the year 2020, but Week 5 against the Raiders proved fatal, as they lost their first game of the year because they weren’t focused enough on the task at hand.

This time around, the motivation is there for Kansas City. They haven’t been swept by the Raiders since 2012 and haven’t been swept by an AFC West opponent since 2014, so the stakes are pretty high this time around. We all know Andy Reid’s track record against the AFC West is quite good, but will the Chiefs sleepwalk their way through this game again?

We’ll dive more into that in a bit. Let’s glance at what Chiefs fans should be keeping an eye out for this Sunday night against the Raiders.

Motivation

I touched on this a little already, but it’s worth mentioning over and over again. The Chiefs have looked bored against lesser competition this season and while that’s their right as the defending Super Bowl champions, they should have known the Raiders were going to bring their all against them in Week 5.

Instead, Kansas City slogged their way through that one and it cost them. We all know the Chiefs will still likely win the AFC West for the fifth straight season, but losing to the Raiders for a second time wouldn’t just be embarrassing, it’d bring the division race much closer than any of us would like for it to be.

That reason along with the fact that the Chiefs are a better team than the Raiders is why this week’s game should go differently. The Chiefs will remember how it felt to lose to the Raiders for the first time in three years and they won’t want to experience that pain and embarrassment again.