3 reasons why 2024 should be the Chiefs’ most aggressive offseason

Kansas City has the rare opportunity for a three-peat as Super Bowl champions, and they should be doing everything in their power to make it happen.

Zero.

That is the number of teams that have ever won three consecutive Super Bowls in NFL history. Eight teams have tried to three-peat after winning back-to-back Super Bowls, and so far, they’re 0-8 in those attempts.

Why is that?

More than any other American professional league, winning in the NFL is the most difficult. Every part of your organization changes when you win a Super Bowl, let alone multiple. Your front office and coaching staff get poached, Your schemes get more solvable over time, and, when you lose a chunk of your coaching staff, it can be difficult to find answers all the time with new coaches who aren’t as familiar with your system.

Another reason why repeating in the NFL is problematic is that players either get too expensive and leave, age out or have a bad streak of injuries. You generally need to have great health luck to win a Super Bowl. Very few teams advance that far with a rash of injuries. It’s just hard to count on that every single year. For example, look at the Cincinnati Bengals this past season. They had relatively good health luck the prior two seasons they were contending for Super Bowls, but a handful of injuries destroyed their entire season. You can’t plan on that, and once those injuries occur, your season is over.

Aging is also an issue. Most Super Bowl teams revolve around a core of players who are in their primes, but NFL primes don’t last forever. You can be great at 28 or 29 years old, but by 30, you’re no longer that same player. It’s hard to account for that.

Not to mention, the finances of keeping a team together is hard. Teams want players off Super Bowl teams. Why? Well, those players are generally very good, but they’re also instrumental in culture-building.

Think of a player like Joe Thuney. The Chiefs won a Super Bowl before they signed Thuney, but his Super Bowl pedigree protecting Tom Brady was a massive reason the Chiefs brought him in. He was dependable and had tons of high-level experience, which was instrumental to getting an entirely new offensive line ready to compete for Super Bowls in 2021 and beyond. Every single team is looking for their Thuney and will pick your roster apart to find that player.

The reality is that the Chiefs getting to three in a row is going to be a crazy difficult challenge. There is a reason that it never has been done before. However, that doesn’t mean the Chiefs shouldn’t be doing everything possible to make NFL history.

Here are three reasons why the Chiefs should be uber-aggressive this offseason:

1. The ages of Andy Reid, Steve Spagnuolo and Travis Kelce

And speaking of aging out, I think that’s a massive factor when looking at three Chiefs core members this offseason: Andy Reid, Steve Spagnuolo, and Travis Kelce.

To start with the coaches, the Chiefs we don’t know how much longer they will coach. By the playoffs next season, Reid will be 66 and Spagnuolo 65. They’ve both accomplished enough in their careers that retirement is now a yearly conversation. Reid and Spagnuolo are some of the best coaches of all time at their respective positions. Once both retire, the chances the Chiefs get better coaches than those two are incredibly slim. You have to take advantage of having their abilities for the team right now.

With Kelce, the end is almost more near than it is for the coaches. Like Spagnuolo and Reid, once Kelce is gone, the Chiefs are never replacing his talent. He’s arguably the best tight end to ever play. It’s going to be incredibly difficult to replace him, so as long as they have that talent on the roster that fits so perfectly with Mahomes, they have to maximize the window they have that player.

2. This is a young core of players who are still currently cheap through next season.

The biggest benefit the Chiefs have is that with the exclusion of Mahomes, Kelce, Thuney, and Chris Jones, their entire core is young and cheap. They have very few long-term commitments to aging players. The way general manager Brett Veach has built the roster over the last two years is incredible. For most teams in the Chiefs position — think the Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Ravens, Philadelphia Eagles, etc. — their rosters are very old, with their core players rising in age. As they’ve pushed and pushed for their rosters, development for players has waned, draft capital is sent for trades, and veterans get almost all the snaps.

The Chiefs have none of these issues.

Most of this entire team is back next season and for multiple seasons at low-cap figures. Before those guys get expensive, they have a two-to-three-year window where they can be super aggressive in acquiring free agents while also maintaining all their depth on this roster. Most teams can’t choose to have both, but the Chiefs are in an incredibly rare position where they can live in both worlds.

3. Last season’s formula might not work for this season.

The thing that makes this Super Bowl win fantastic yet surprising is that the Chiefs were an extremely flawed team. For large chunks of the offense, they were a bad offensive team. Yes, they were able to battle through it, but the Chiefs weren’t a regular-season juggernaut in the ways they were in 2019 or 2022.

The reality is, if you replay this season 10 times, this version of the Chiefs team may win the title one or two times, given the flaws of this team. That’s not to take away their accomplishment, but more of a statement that if you asked the Chiefs whether they wanted to build through this path again, the answer would be an obvious no.

Playing from an underdog on the road in multiple games isn’t a sustainable formula every year, and the Chiefs should strive for more than that.

The bottom line

The good news? The Chiefs have so much room for improvement.

The offense was terrible for large chunks of this year, but they could feasibly be a top-three offense if they make a few moves at wide receiver.

If the Chiefs retain their defensive free agents, the defense is young enough with a good coach that it should continue being a top-five unit — something they have been ever since Trent McDuffie began his pro career.

The Chiefs are in an all-time position. Very few teams get the opportunity to have this amount of young depth and talent while still having the financial flexibility to add and retain players. There is no reason to believe that this core of players should be regressing, and I would argue more reason that this team should be getting even better. If they decide to be super aggressive on next year’s team, why can’t they be a team that potentially gets mentioned as an all-time team with a top-three offense and defense?

So, what does all this mean?

For me, the plan is to push money into the future and invest in this team. With the right contracts, defensive tackle Chris Jones and cornerback L’Jarius Sneed may both be back, and invest in wide receiver in free agency. The Chiefs have won the Super Bowl the last two years with cheaper rosters, and they deserve credit for that. But with NFL history on the line, you go for it.

If you three-peat, that could be the greatest run in NFL history. If you aren’t doing everything to make that happen, then what are you doing as a franchise?