The Kansas City Chiefs are the luckiest team in pro sports history

On Black Friday, I attended a Friendsgiving party where I watched the Chiefs-Raiders game with a friend who is a die-hard Chiefs fan. I’m a Bills fan, and I detest the Chiefs and their legions of bandwagon fans with every fiber of my being. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes endorses seemingly every product in America, and I do my best to boycott them all. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his insufferable girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are just as unavoidable, and being forced to watch her gleeful celebrations of Chiefs touchdowns is arguably even more unpleasant than listening to her favorite politician, Kamala Harris, wax poetic about the passage of time.

My Bills have never won a Super Bowl, while the Chiefs have captured three of the last five and have the best record in the NFL this season at 11-1. The Chiefs have eliminated the Bills from the playoffs in three of the last four seasons, twice in heartbreaking fashion. But none of this matters in terms of my allegiance — the Chiefs could win every Super Bowl from now until Doomsday and I’d still despise them. This season, the Chiefs have been uncommonly lucky, even by their own fortuitous standards, and my hatred of them has spiraled, so much so that the Southern Poverty Law Center could classify me as a hate group.

I wasn’t looking forward to the party and the near certainty of watching my friend celebrate a Chiefs win. The Raiders came into the game at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium 2-9 and were missing their starting quarterback, two of their starting cornerbacks and their top two running backs. But the Chiefs played poorly, and with fifteen seconds left in the game, all the Raiders had to do was nail a forty-seven-yard field goal to win the game. But then the Raiders, who had no time outs left, inexplicably decided to run another play. 

Their center snapped the ball before their quarterback, Aidan O’Connell, was ready for the ball, but an official whistled the play dead before the Chiefs recovered the fumble. But alas, the referees huddled and decided to switch the call from false start — a dead ball foul that ends the play — to illegal shift, a live ball foul a team can decline. It never should have counted as a turnover. But that’s exactly what the refs ruled, sealing the Chiefs eleventh win of the season in dubious fashion.

My friend raised his arms and triumph and just laughed. He’s seen plenty of wins like this before. And he got to enjoy another fluky Chiefs win the following week, though luckily I didn’t have to see him celebrate that 19-17 win over the Chargers. Once again the setup for the Chiefs was favorable: they were at home and Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert didn’t have his two best weapons — Ladd McConkey and J.K. Dobbins — available due to injuries. Yet, once again, they played poorly and the game came down to a chip shot field goal attempt with one second left. When I first saw the ball leave Chiefs’s kicker Matthew Wright’s foot I felt a jolt of excitement as he clearly shanked it badly left. Finally, the Chiefs were going to lose a close game after winning fourteen one-score games in a row! But his hook shot doinked off the upright and in for another incredibly atypical but by now very routinely lucky Chiefs win.

Let’s review some evidence of the Chiefs’ good fortune in recent years. The Chiefs offensive line wasn’t called for a single holding penalty in their last three Super Bowls, even though they committed several such infractions during their 25-22 overtime win against the 49ers last year. In four playoff games last season, the referees called more than twice as many penalties on the Chiefs opponents (thirty-nine) than them (eighteen).

In Super Bowl LVII, in 2023, the winning score in the Chiefs 38-35 triumph was set up with a holding call on the Eagles James Bradberry, who tugged the jersey of Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith Schuster. By the letter of the law, it was a penalty, but Patrick Mahomes’s pass was grossly overthrown, and the refs had also been letting jersey tugs go all game — it was the first defensive holding call made. The ball also bounced their way in the playoffs last season — the Chiefs recovered eight of eleven fumbles.

Its been more of the same this season, with the Chiefs benefitting from dozens of questionable calls. For example, their week two, 26-25 win over the Bengals was ensured with a questionable pass interference call on Bengals defender Daijahn Anthony on fourth and sixteen late in the game. Then, in a 22-17 win over the Falcons the following week, Atlanta had a chance to take a late lead but the refs missed a blatant pass interference infraction on Chiefs defender Bryan Cook who molested Falcons tight end Kyle Pitts. Chiefs right tackle Jawaan Taylor also got away with a blatant false start that proved to be pivotal in his team’s overtime win over Tampa Bay in week nine. And there were several egregious calls in favor of the Chiefs in their lucky 16-14 win over the Broncos in week ten, which was sealed when the Chiefs blocked a thirty-five-yard field goal as time expired.

Then there’s the fact that the refs seem to have a habit of overturning Mahomes’s turnovers. According to Sporting News’s data compiled in late September, the Chiefs quarterback has had a league-leading twenty-two interceptions and eight fumbles overturned by penalties in his career; 0.48 percent of his career pass attempts are overturned interceptions. Aaron Rodgers is in second place but all the way down at 0.17 percent.

Bad calls from the referees have been just a part of the Chiefs luck particularly against the Bills in the playoffs. Last season, Tyler Bass missed a forty-four-yard field goal that would have tied the score with 1:47 left in the game. Our infamous “thirteen seconds” loss two seasons ago was infinitely worse. We inexplicably didn’t squib our kickoff with thirteen seconds left after taking a late lead and then surrendered a game-tying field goal. Predictably, we lost the coin toss, and our offense never had a chance to take the field in overtime.

The Chiefs now have the worst point differential of any 12-1 team in NFL history at +56. Though they have the best record in the league, there are ten other teams with a better point differential. They are 9-0 in one-score games this season; six of those opponents do not currently have a winning record. They won nine one-score games last year and ten in 2022.  In many of these games, the Chiefs were fortunate to prevail. For example, in the season opener this year, Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely scored a potentially game-tying or winning touchdown (depending on the outcome of the extra point or two-point try) with five seconds left, only for it to be overturned on video review when a camera angle revealed that a fraction of a millimeter of Likely’s cleat touched the back line as he hauled in the catch. “He’s gotta wear white cleats next time,” Mahomes said of the play afterwards.

Why are the Chiefs so lucky? Their fans will say they’ve made their own luck and contend that winning close games is a skill their team has perfected. Fair enough. And yes, I concede that the Chiefs haven’t just been lucky, but also very good, at least at times. But many fans contend that the NFL is now as rigged as a WWE match in the Chiefs’ favor. The NFL is a business, and they argue that Taylor Swift and her legions of bandwagon Chiefs fans are good for business. And of course, there are also many people like me who despise the Chiefs and tune in to their games hoping they’ll lose. As much as I’d like to get behind this conspiracy theory, it’s just too far-fetched. If it existed, someone would have leaked evidence to the media by now and no one has.

While there may not be an organized conspiracy to help the Chiefs, the team’s good fortune is remarkable and inexplicable, though there is research to indicate that referees are biased toward star players and quality teams. NBA All-Stars are given an additional 0.32 free attempts per minute during the fourth quarter of NBA playoff games. Figure skating judges have been shown to award higher scores to well-known competitors. And an analysis of penalty shot data from the Norwegian soccer league found that successful teams were more likely to receive incorrect penalty calls.

Patrick Ward, a data analysis expert who specializes in football, concludes that luck plays a more important role in the NFL than in other pro sports. Ward’s data indicates that luck has a 39 percent contribution to an NFL team’s odds of winning, compared to just 15 percent in the NBA and 18 percent in MLB. In his memoir, legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh estimated that luck accounts for 20 percent of outcomes. Whatever the correct figure, as we approach the playoffs, fans of every other team in the NFL hope that Wilson Mizner was correct when he said, “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.”