The Wide Open AFC West

We have five weeks to go in the NFL season, and things are starting to make sense. The NFC is a bloodbath among highly competitive teams. The AFC is run by Pittsburgh and New England. The Browns are mathematically eliminated, and someone mediocre is going to win the AFC South.

These were the storylines we expected at the beginning of the year, and they have more or less held firm from that point until now. But you’ll notice that there was one division I didn’t mention in the first paragraph, one group of teams that haven’t given us any clear answers so far.

Through the early part of the season the AFC West seemed pretty clearcut. After four weeks the Chiefs were undefeated and the Chargers had yet to win a game. The Broncos were 3-1 with quality wins over Oakland and Dallas. And the Raiders were 2-2, still very much alive for a repeat playoff appearance.

Since then things have taken a drastic turn. The Chiefs still lead the division with a record of 6-5, but they’re now only a game up on the Raiders who continue to linger right around .500. The Broncos have lost seven straight and cycled through three different starting quarterbacks. And most shocking of all, the Chargers are now 5-6, tied with the Raiders for second in the division and well within striking distance of the playoffs.

This division has completely turned on its head over the past few weeks, and it’s become the most competitive race over the final stretch of the season. So I thought I’d run through one by one to see where each team stands now and try to figure out where they go from here.

Denver Broncos (3-8)

I won’t have much to say on the Broncos. I covered them a bit last week, and they aren’t really in contention, sitting multiple games behind every other team in the division. But I thought as a quick follow up on last week’s piece I’d give a summary of Paxton Lynch’s brief tenure as a starting quarterback.

Prior to leaving with an ankle injury, Lynch put up some pretty ugly numbers against the Raiders. He threw 14 passes and completed 9, totaling only 41 yards in the process. He had no touchdowns and one interception, and he managed to lose 23 yards on four sacks.

This would be an ugly performance against anyone, and it’s particularly terrible against the Raiders. The interception he threw was the first that Oakland has gotten this year. Even after Lynch’s performance, quarterbacks against the Raiders have a QB Rating of 110.0, the third highest in NFL history (narrowly behind the winless 2008 Lions and the 2015 Saints).

Lynch’s total ineffectiveness against one of the worst pass defenses in NFL history is all I really need to see. I wasn’t a fan of him entering the draft, and so far he’s shown no sign that he can play in the NFL. He’s under contract for two more years, but I think Denver needs to write him off as a lost cause and try again in the draft this season. If he turns things around, that’s great, but right now I’d bet strongly against that happening.

Oakland Raiders (5-6)

Oakland was one of the most exciting young teams in the league coming into the season. A year removed from their first playoff appearance in more than a decade, this was supposed to be the year that they jumped into the top tier of the AFC. Instead they have been up and down on their way to a mediocre record, and they now sit with more losses than wins with five games left on the season.

If you read the section above, you probably noticed where I called the Raiders “one of the worst pass defenses in NFL history”. That certainly isn’t a good thing, but I should point out that last year’s Raiders were hardly tearing the league apart on that side of the ball, and they still managed to finish 12-4 and earn a spot in the postseason.

So if we can’t blame a falloff in defensive performance, what is responsible for Oakland’s poor record this year? The first clear culprit is natural regression. There were a lot of signs that pointed to Oakland falling off after a performance a year ago that wasn’t as good as their record indicated. They were 8-1 in games decided by a single score, the sort of games that all studies have indicated are essentially random over a large sample. If they had instead finished 4-5 in these games a year ago, their final record would have been 8-8, not so different from the 5-6 they find themselves at right now. And so far this season they are 3-2 in such games, much closer to what you’d expect.

This can definitely explain a lot of their struggles, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Oakland hasn’t fallen off as far from last year as it appears at first glance, but they still are undoubtedly playing worse.

The key to Oakland’s struggles this year is on the offensive side of the ball, the side that seemed as set as any unit in the league. Last season they had an emerging young quarterback, a dynamic pair of receivers, and an offensive line that dominated in both the running and the passing game. They added a big name running back in Marshawn Lynch and a dynamic playmaker in Cordarrelle Patterson, and they should have kept rolling into 2017.

That hasn’t been the case. The first and most obvious failure is the disappointing performance of Lynch. So far this year he is averaging 3.7 yards per carry, and he has yet to repeat his opening game performance of 76 yards. Oakland’s running game has struggled despite their imposing offensive line, and most of the blame has to go to their running backs.

It isn’t a surprise that a 31 year old running back who didn’t play a year ago has struggled. Oakland thrived without a running game last year, and they expected to be able to do the same this year. But they’ve had problems at every level in the passing game that have kept them from repeating last year’s dynamic performance.

This was supposed to be the year that Amari Cooper established himself as one of the best receivers in the league. The fourth overall pick in 2015 went over 1000 yards in each of his first two seasons, but he has yet to make it to 500 through 11 games this year. He has struggled with drops, and now he could potentially miss this week’s game with a concussion. Along with Michael Crabtree’s suspension, the Raiders are suddenly lacking talent on the outside.

The struggles of the receivers have gotten the attention, but there are a lot more problems going on with Oakland’s passing game. Currently Oakland ranks sixth in the league in adjusted sack rates, having allowed 17 sacks in 11 games. That sounds extremely good, until you realize that last year they finished first in adjusted sack rate and allowed only 18 sacks in 16 games.

The key to Oakland’s success on offense a year ago was that everything went absolutely perfect in the passing game. Derek Carr is an excellent quarterback when things are structured well around him, but he hasn’t developed the skills to excel in messy situations. He panics under pressure, is reluctant to throw into tight windows, and makes mistakes when he presses to try to make a play. He has eight interceptions on the season after only six a year ago, and the talk of him as an MVP candidate is long behind us.

The Raiders are still only a game back in the division, but I have a hard time seeing them winning it. They have an easy game this week against the Giants, but after that they have only one more game at home and have to go on the road against the Chiefs, Eagles, and Chargers. Their defense has been a liability for close to two years now, and I doubt they can recapture the magic to turn their offense around. Oakland still has enough young talent to be a real threat over the next few years, but it’s starting to look like 2017 was an inevitable step back.

Los Angeles Chargers (5-6)

I should probably stop trying to make predictions about the Chargers. No team walks a tightrope quite like they do, and no team has so consistently fallen flat on their face. Over the first month of the season, it looked like another case of the same old Chargers. They lost their first two games due to missed kicks in the final minutes, and after losses to the Chiefs and the Eagles it looked like they had blown another season.

A 5-2 record since then has gotten them very much in the race for the division. And with games left against the Browns and the Jets, they should have no trouble keeping their winning ways going. They’ve won their past two games by a combined score of 82-30, and right now they’re as hot as any team in the AFC.

So what’s changed? The easy answer is that the bad luck that’s infected them for several years now finally turned around. But that isn’t necessarily true. They still have had injury issues that have cost them a couple starters on the offensive line, star cornerback Jason Verrett, and several games from first round pick Mike Williams. And they haven’t exactly stopped blowing games in the final minutes. Between 1994 and 2016 there were only two games in which a team threw an interception while trailing in the final two minutes and went on to win the game. Blake Bortles did it twice in their Week 10 overtime victory over the Chargers.

The truth is that the Chargers have just started playing better, on both the offensive and defensive side of the ball. During the first few weeks the only thing that was really working was the pass rush. Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram are as good as any duo in the league, and they’ve dominated from the opening snap of the season. And over the past few weeks the secondary has stepped up to match them. Casey Heyward has played at an All-Pro level, giving them a threat on the back end to take advantage of the chaos produced in the front.

The offense has similarly erupted in the passing game. Philip Rivers struggled early in the year, but he seems to have stabilized, figuring out he can succeed just by throwing it up to Keenan Allen and Hunter Henry. Allen is one of the best wide receivers in the league, and for the first time in years he is healthy (knock on every piece of wood I can find), giving them stability on offense that has allowed them to run away from opponents the past couple weeks.

The Chargers are now a game back of the division leading Chiefs, and with a win already over Oakland I’d be willing to say they are the clear choice of challengers in this division. Saying this, I’m sure the Chargers will find some way to blow their next few games, but right now they’re playing far better than the team they are chasing.

Kansas City Chiefs (5-6)

The season script for the Chiefs has been almost the complete opposite of the Chargers. Their opening two wins over the Patriots and the Eagles still stand as probably the two most impressive of the season, and they followed those up with three easy victories to make them the last undefeated team in the league. Even after competitive loss to the Steelers and a last second loss to the Raiders they were able to beat the Broncos to get their record to 6-2, with an easy lead in the division and a path to the top seed in the AFC.

Since then the wheels have completely come off the wagon. They’ve suffered three straight defeats, dropping in increasingly embarrassing fashion to the Cowboys, the Giants, and the Bills. Their lead in the division has shrunk to only a single game, and they are now all but eliminated from earning a first round bye.

It’s not hard to see where things have gone wrong. After averaging 29 points a game over their first eight games, they’ve scored a total of 36 over the past three, seven of which came on a ridiculous last play of the first half catch and run by Tyreek Hill against the Cowboys. They failed to even reach the endzone against the Giants and fared almost as poorly against the Bills.

The Chiefs came out blazing on offense this year thanks to sheer brilliance from Andy Reid. Their offense over the first few weeks looked like nothing else we’ve seen in the NFL, incorporating college spread concepts into a system that knocked opposing defenses completely off balance. Their stable of weapons is below average, but they were made into dynamic threats running sideline to sideline in pre- and post-snap motions that defenses could not track.

This sort of scheme work is crucial in the NFL, and it’s one of the things that makes Andy Reid among the best coaches in the league. But Reid’s consistent failure throughout his career has been his inability to adjust on the fly, as seen by his repeated struggles to manage the clock. He processes things slowly within the game, and so far this year he hasn’t been able to take the brilliant scheme work from the offseason and take the next step as opposing defenses adjust.

The Chiefs have become complacent and repetitive, and without the element of surprise they are a below average offense. Tyreek Hill is a developing talent, but he still has a lot of work to do to become a reliable receiver, and until then he is really only a threat with his straightline speed. Defenses know this, and as long as they can predict where he’s going to run they can stay over the top of him, cutting off the big plays that were available earlier in the season.

The dropoff in Kareem Hunt’s performance has hurt as well, but that was always inevitable. His game was buoyed by an impossible to sustain number of explosive runs, and he’s still averaging 4.8 yards per carry for the season. Hopefully he’ll have more than the 17 yards he put up against the Bills last week, but the Chiefs shouldn’t have to count on him breaking 50 yard runs every single game.

The biggest problem with Kansas City’s offense is the same as it has always been, and that is Alex Smith. His performance perfectly mirrors the success of their scheme this year. When it was unpredictable and original, he was a star earning MVP buzz. Since it's became ordinary, he has looked like a complete mess. He is an extreme version of Carr, a quarterback whose success is entirely dependent on everything going perfectly around him.

Smith’s strength as a quarterback is his consistent ability to get out of every play exactly what is available for him to get. His weakness is his inability to get anything more. When the scheme carves free a wide open receiver, he will find and hit that receiver. When the scheme asks him to make tough decisions and throws, he isn’t going to do anything with it. He waits until he sees Hill open up rather than trusting him to separate while the ball is in the air. He doesn’t let Travis Kelce fight through contact to make contested catches. And when the pressure closes in, he does everything in his power to avoid a loss on the play, at the expense of making something better happen.

This hasn’t changed in the past decade, and it isn’t going to change in the next month. The key to Kansas City’s hopes is Reid finding a way to revitalize his system. There may not be a better offensive mind in the league than Reid, and the Chiefs have historically come on strong down the stretch. Despite the surging Chargers, I still think the Chiefs are the favorite to come out of the AFC West, even if the odds are a lot worse than they were just a few weeks ago.