The Kansas City Chiefs are back at .500 after a 30-17 win over the Detroit Lions on Sunday night.
The Chiefs put together their finest performance of the season to improve to 3-3, holding the high-powered Lions offense to its lowest scoring total since Week 1 while racking up 354 yards on offense for their first win against a winning opponent.
Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes rebounded from a Week 5 loss with his highest passer rating of the year, 132.2. He completed 22 of 30 passes for 257 yards and three touchdowns. He also ran for 34 yards and another score.
“We handled business,” Mahomes told NBC’s Melissa Stark.
Detroit quarterback Jared Goff threw for 203 yards and two touchdowns for the Lions, who fell to 4-2 and had their four-game winning streak snapped.
Goff and Detroit started hot, driving all the way to Kansas City’s 1-yard line on the game’s opening possession. He appeared to catch a touchdown pass on a trick play on 4th-and-goal, but a penalty nullified the score, and Detroit settled for a field goal. The teams then traded touchdowns before they traded failed fourth-down conversions.
Once again, the Lions committed a costly error on a fourth-down play, as receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown dropped a pass that would have given Detroit a first down in Chiefs territory late in the second quarter. Instead, Kansas City needed only eight plays to go 55 yards to score a touchdown following the failed attempt, changing the tenor of the game.
The Chiefs then came out of halftime with another touchdown drive, and with the lead, their defense tightened up. In the second half, Kansas City forced two punts and had another fourth-down stop, helping maintain a two-score lead for much of the final 30 minutes.
Detroit’s self-inflicted wounds certainly played a role in the loss.
The Lions committed four penalties for 38 yards. In addition to the Goff blunder in the first quarter, a late hit by Aiden Hutchinson in the fourth quarter greatly aided a Chiefs touchdown drive.
Between the miscues and an injury-laden defense that forced only one punt, Detroit couldn’t come up with a winning effort.
Kansas City, meanwhile, is 3-1 in its last four games after an 0-2 start to the season. The Chiefs are also only one game behind both the Los Angeles Chargers and the Denver Broncos in the AFC West despite their slow start to the season.
Perhaps as a sign of how badly each team wanted to win Sunday’s game, there was a scuffle when the game ended after Lions safety Brian Branch ignored a handshake attempt from Mahomes. Juju Smith-Schuster took offense to the gesture and confronted Branch, who responded by shoving Smith-Schuster.
“We play the game in between the whistles. They can do all the extracurricular stuff they want to do,” Mahomes said.
He added, on the importance of the win: “That’s a good football team. It shows what we can do. We’ll try to carry this momentum into the next game.”
