XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
On Sunday night, the Chargers visit the Chiefs for a 43-point total game with Kansas City favored by 4. Given how good the Chargers have been on both sides of the ball lately (only two teams have scored over 20 points on them, and their offense has looked a LOT better since their bye), this line is giving a ton of respect to the Chiefs, but to be fair, they’ve earned it over multiple seasons. As we have another Chiefs Showdown, I need to once again note how heartily mid-tier their offense has been (24.1 points per game, Mahomes with just a 19:11 TD:INT ratio, and 248 passing yards per game). It’s frankly astounding that they’re 11-1. I mean, they’re clearly a good team, they should have a good record, but 9 of their 11 wins have been by a single score. They’ve had multiple wins I’d consider pretty fluky – a blocked field goal, the other team missing a field goal in pretty easy range, etc. They’re good, but they’re not THIS good, so the Vegas line might be leaning a bit more in their direction than it really should.
Kansas City
In Isaiah Pacheco’s first game back from a lengthy absence, he played 37% of the snaps and handled 8 opportunities, Kareem Hunt played 37% of the snaps with 11 opportunities (including a noteworthy 4 targets), Samaje Perine was on the field for 25% of the snaps but saw just 1 opportunity, and Carson Steele was dusted as expected with just 3 offensive snaps and no opportunities. We should expect Pacheco’s role to grow, but this is a tough backfield right now because we don’t know by how much, and we don’t know the end state of where it’s growing to – will it be a roughly 50/50 split between Pacheco and Hunt? 60/40? At their prices, they’re playable because none of the KC backs are priced for full workloads, with Pacheco having the most per-touch upside and Hunt looking like something of a bargain down at $6,400, but with what looks like fairly modest volume you’re likely going to need a touchdown for one of these guys to pay off.
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The Chiefs passing game is equally rotational with all of DeAndre Hopkins, Xavier Worthy, Justin Watson, and JuJu Smith-Schuster playing between 45% and 59% of the snaps last week. Watson’s role seems to be the most under threat from JuJu returning from injury and Hopkins joining the team, but none of these guys are playing what we could consider full-time roles. Hopkins, and recently Worthy, have done the best job of earning targets while on the field. In the last three weeks since JuJu returned and we’ve had this primary set of 4 wideouts, Hopkins has 19 targets, Worthy has 18, Watson has 7, and JuJu has 4. Hopkins is the safest option but Worthy is also a strong tourney consideration as he has “score from anywhere on the field” level speed.
At tight end, Travis Kelce is playing almost all of the snaps, and while the Chiefs seem like they would like to take it a bit easy on him in the regular season, their propensity for playing close games means they need to keep leaning on him (in that three week window since JuJu came back, Kelce leads the team with 25 targets). He’s only gaining 8.5 yards per reception against a career average of 12.2 and this is only the second season of his career under 12 (last season was the other one). Father time comes for us all and it seems to have taken away some of Kelce’s ceiling but he’s still a solid option and he’s a bit underpriced for what is essentially a WR1 role at just $9k. Finally, Noah Gray has a very big TE2 role – he’s actually outsnapped all of the WRs in the past three games as the Chiefs run 12-personnel at an extremely high rate. He spends a lot of time blocking but still has 15 targets in that game, so he’s really worth being viewed through a similar lens as the WRs. At $4,400, his projectable volume isn’t much less than that of Hopkins or Worthy. I think he’s one of the strongest value options in this Showdown. Finally, Mecole Hardman is still playing a few snaps and can be viewed as a punt play.
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