The Kansas City Chiefs looked like they had a Super Bowl hangover in the first quarter of their season opener against the Los Angeles Chargers on Friday night.
After allowing the Chargers to go up 10-0 in the second quarter, the Chiefs started to wake up, but they failed to overtake their AFC West rival in a 27-21 loss in front of 47,627 fans at Corinthians Arena in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Following the game, quarterback Patrick Mahomes had a warning for the Chiefs, saying they needed to play with better energy if they wanted to win games this season.
“They came out with more energy than we did, their defense than our offense,” Mahomes said, via Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk. “I thought we had energy at practice yesterday and all throughout the week, but if you don’t come out with the right mindset, you get beat… (The Chargers) definitely came out with more energy than we did. In this league, everybody’s too good for you to not match the energy of our opponent, so I think we learned a valuable lesson.”
The Kansas City Chiefs need to start faster
The lesson was one Kansas City should have learned after suffering a 40-22 beatdown by the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl months earlier.
The Eagles took advantage of a flat Chiefs team, taking a 24-0 lead into halftime. Kansas City scored 16 points in the fourth quarter to make the score look closer than the game actually was.
The Chiefs — who are dealing with a major injury concern as well as in-fighting among teammates — will have to start fast in Week 2 when they face an Eagles team that scored 21 points in the first half of their 24-20 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday night. If they don’t match Philadelphia’s energy on Sept. 14, the Chiefs could be staring at a 0-2 record for the first time since 2014.