Quick heads up — I’m taking a one-week break from college football (extremely disrespectful to Army-Navy, I know) so there won’t be a newsletter in your inbox next Sunday. I’ll be back for NFL coverage Monday, and I’ll make up the CFB newsletter deficit at some point in December/January, when there will be a lot of great college football on a lot of weird days.

Onto the football!

– Rodger Sherman

After Sunday night’s Chiefs-Texans matchup, I debated whether to write about the Texans, who are an exciting team with a jaw-dropping defense, or the Chiefs, who are a sub-.500 team whose structural and personnel problems remain largely unchanged from the last 10,000 times you read about them. I came to the conclusion that I’ll have plenty of opportunity to write about the Texans in the playoffs. The Chiefs … not so much.

That Texans defense had the Chiefs in hell. Patrick Mahomes had the worst night of his career, throwing for 160 yards and three interceptions, setting career lows in completion percentage (42.4), passer rating (19.8), and adjusted yards per attempt (0.76). During the fourth quarter, Mahomes threw 10 consecutive incomplete passes, the longest stretch of his career.

But on many of those passes, Mahomes’ weak supporting cast was to blame. Four Chiefs drives ended on drops, and the game-ending interception went through the hands of the once-reliable Travis Kelce. The Chiefs have now lost two games this season on balls that hit Kelce in the hands but wound up as interceptions.

The Chiefs are now officially out of contention for the AFC West championship, and have just a 16 percent chance of making the playoffs, per The Athletic. They’ll likely need help to pull it off, even if they run the table with wins over the Broncos and Chargers. Streaks of ten straight playoff appearances, nine straight division titles, and three straight Super Bowl appearances are likely coming to an end.

Which is funny, because these 6-7 Chiefs are arguably better than last year’s 15-2 Chiefs who made the Super Bowl. These 6-7 Chiefs are sixth in DVOA, while last year’s AFC Champs were eighth. They have the 10th-best point differential in the NFL, compared to the 12th-best last year. Their offense has improved slightly from 22.6 points per game to 24.2 points per game. Mahomes is throwing for slightly more yards per attempt this season (7.2, up from 6.8), and the Chiefs are averaging more yards per rush (4.4, up from 4.0).

The big difference is that the Chiefs went 12-0 in one-score games last year, and are just 1-6 in 2025.

The Chiefs seem to have lost The Thing that made them special. From the start of this dynasty, they’ve feasted on brilliant late-game miracles. They won their first Super Bowl with back-to-back-to-back double-digit comebacks. They famously scored a game-tying field goal in 13 seconds against the Bills in 2021. They won the 2023 AFC Championship and Super Bowl on last-second kicks. They won the 2024 Super Bowl in overtime.

Some would argue that winning is a skill, and Kansas City’s talents were perfect for late-game, frenzied scenarios — say, Mahomes’ ability to scramble for N+1 yards on 3rd-and-N, or Kelce’s ability to find soft spots in opposing defenses.

That skill has been absent this season. The Chiefs had plenty of opportunities to seize last night’s game. Head coach Andy Reid made a pair of aggressive fourth-down calls that would have paid off in the past. Last night, the Chiefs dropped the ball.

Perhaps they’re aggressively regressing to the mean. Or maybe the Chiefs have simply lost the Mandate of Heaven. The franchise has plenty of time to regroup around Mahomes, who is only 31. But it feels like the era of everything going right for Kansas City has come to an end.

What do you fear most in the world? What’s the form that It would take against you? The thing they’d show you in Room 101?

Spiders? Zombies? The slow decay of society in spite of (or perhaps because of) unprecedented access to all the information ever throughout human existence? Sharks? Let’s go with sharks.

For the Indianapolis Colts, the Scariest Thing In The World is EverBank Stadium, in Jacksonville, Florida. At a glance, that’s like being terrified of turkeys or toasters. How is that the thing keeping you up at night?

But on Sunday, the Colts lost 36-19 in the Duval Dungeon for their first multi-score loss of the season, and their 11th consecutive road loss to the Jaguars.

With the L, the Colts ceded first place of the AFC South to the Jags. In a month flat, they’ve gone from being the best team in the AFC to out of the playoff picture.

To make matters worse, the Colts lost starting quarterback Daniel Jones for the season to an Achilles tear. With backup QB Anthony Richardson also out after he broke a bone in his face while stretching with resistance bands in October, the Colts are down to third-stringer Riley Leonard, a sixth-round rookie. It’s so over.

I’m deeply fascinated by the Colts’ losing streak in Duval. Since their last win in Jacksonville in 2014 — a game in which both Denard Robinson and Toby Gerhart played, if you like guy-remembering — the Colts have been slightly better than .500 (96-93-1), while the Jags are just 67-123. Jacksonville is 33-46 at home since 2015, good for the fourth-worst win percentage in the NFL at 41.3 percent. And yet, the Jags 11-0 at home against the Colts. That’s one-third of the Jags’ home victories in the past decade. Meanwhile, their home winning percentage is a paltry 32.3 percent against Not The Colts.

Sunday’s loss may not have been the worst Colts defeat in Duval during this losing streak — in 2021, they missed the playoffs because they couldn’t beat a team that had just fired Urban Meyer in Week 18 — but it’s gotta be close. They lost the division lead, their playoff spot, and their starting QB in one fell swoop.

It feels like just yesterday that the Colts were the story of the NFL season. After starting the season 7-1, they traded away two first-round picks for Sauce Gardner, making exactly the type of bold, all-in move that we love to see from Super Bowl-contending teams. But Gardner only played two games for the Colts before getting hurt, and now Jones is out for the season. The Colts have lost three of four games, and while The Athletic still gives them a 30 percent chance at making the postseason, that’s going to be difficult with a third-stringer helming the offense.

If the Colts can’t go deep this year, their decision to buy high on their early season success could cost them for years to come. But clearly, their biggest mistake was making big moves before going to Jacksonville. They’ll never be anything until they can defeat their biggest fear.

Meanwhile, the Jags are building, with a first-year head coach and their top draft pick, Travis Hunter, out for the season. The Colts can’t escape the Duval Dungeon even when the Jags are pitiful. What will happen if Jacksonville gets good?

Typically, I am not the football blogger who tells you what players were supposed to be doing on certain plays. There are a lot of smarter guys and gals grinding tape out there.

However, I feel confident about this one: On the deciding two-point conversion in Titans-Browns — allegedly an NFL game — Quinshon Judkins messed up the trick play. He forgot he was supposed to pitch the ball until the guy he was supposed to pitch to had already ran past him. Judkins tried to amend his error by running backwards 20 yards and throwing the ball across the field to the guy he was supposed to pitch to. Surprisingly, this didn’t work:

Here’s the frustrating thing: The Browns had been setting up this play for weeks! Judkins has scored four touchdowns on Wildcat runs since Shedeur Sanders became the starter. The entire Titans defense flowed with Judkins. The Browns had two lanes wide open for the runner here:

And Judkins just … didn’t do it. I can’t imagine there was anything for Judkins to read here. He had no blocking in the direction he ran, and multiple clean lanes back the other way.

Was this the most important play of the day? No. But it was the most comically futile, and that’s what this newsletter is all about.

❓ The Ravens could have beaten the Steelers on this Isaiah Likely catch … but the officials ruled that even though Likely had possession and took two steps with the football, he didn’t “perform any act common to the game” after taking his two steps, so it was an incomplete pass.

🦪 In his final season as Louisville’s starting QB, Tyler Shough had 19 rushing yards and one touchdown. In Sunday’s stunning win against the Buccaneers, he had 55 rushing yards and two touchdowns!

9️⃣ J.J. MCCARTHY IS BACK AND HE’S HERE TO PERSONALLY DUNK ON ME FOR CALLING HIM THE WORST QB IN THE NFL. He threw for three touchdowns and no interceptions in a 31-0 win over the Commanders. The Vikings became the first team since 1992 to pitch a shutout a week after getting shut out themselves.