The Chiefs’ historic offense is forcing teams to get creative to try and keep up

By Seth Keysor Nov 5, 2018 27
“To have a chance, they’re going to have to pull out all the stops today.”

That phrase, or something like it, is something heard before a very specific kind of football matchup: a David vs. a Goliath. It’s reserved for games in which an underdog team is facing an unstoppable force and will need every single edge it can manufacture. The premise is that in order to have a chance at winning, a team will need to take risks and simply hope they pay off.

Over the years, the Kansas City Chiefs have been part of games like that before, ones in which they needed to get creative to even have a chance to win. On Sunday, however, they found themselves in a somewhat unfamiliar position: They were the Goliath. The Cleveland Browns, having just fired their head coach, tried everything in the book to stay in a game they didn’t think they could win straight up.

The Browns were very aggressive from the moment the game began. On their very first drive, Cleveland faced...