The NFL sure sent an emphatic message as it unveiled the full 2025 season schedule on Wednesday: The Kansas City Chiefs are now America’s Team, and as long as Patrick Mahomes is under center, they’re the league’s most valuable broadcast commodity.
The NFL has placed the Chiefs on its biggest stages for the first six weeks of the season, starting with a Week 1 game against the Chargers in São Paulo, Brazil—which will be available to stream cost-free on YouTube. In Week 2, we’ll see the Chiefs in a Super Bowl rematch against Philadelphia in Fox’s late afternoon window. In Week 3, the Chiefs will face the Giants on Sunday Night Football on NBC, they’ll face AFC rival Baltimore in CBS’s prime afternoon window in Week 4, and then play the Jaguars on Monday Night Football in Week 5. They’ll be back on Sunday Night Football, this time against the Lions, in Week 6.
If that wasn’t enough to prove that the NFL is milking the Patrick Mahomes Industrial Complex for all it’s worth, the league has dropped the Chiefs into its biggest regular-season spot: against the Cowboys on Thanksgiving afternoon. And for the third consecutive season we’ll get the Chiefs on Christmas Day, this time playing the Broncos in the nightcap of the holiday tripleheader in a game that will be streamed on Prime Video.
Kansas City has a league-most seven games in prime time—one more than Dallas, who will play in the first game on the Christmas Day slate. (Other notable prime-time darlings are, oddly, the Falcons—who’ll likely be underdogs in each of their games—and the Commanders, which is a bet on Jayden Daniels’s growing star power and the improved strength of the Commanders brand.) It’s almost as if the league is pretending the Chiefs Fatigue that set in for so many football fans last year wasn’t real, with the NFL dead set on pushing us far past the saturation point with Mahomes and Co. at a time when the Chiefs are even less interesting, and possibly worse, than they were a year ago as they embarked on a quest for an unprecedented Super Bowl three-peat.
The last time we saw the Chiefs, they were getting run off the field by the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX. They didn’t just fail in their attempt to win another Super Bowl, they were thoroughly embarrassed. (As if you weren’t being inundated with enough Chiefs content this week, ESPN just released a trailer for a Last Dance–esque docuseries called The Kingdom, which chronicles the Chiefs’ failed three-peat bid.) In building its 2025 schedule this way, with the Chiefs as the marquee attraction, the NFL seems to be banking on Mahomes and Andy Reid and the entire Chiefs organization finding some sort of redemption. At the very least, the NFL is trying to capitalize on the crossover stardom of Mahomes and Travis Kelce, who could be playing his final season.
Even after the disappointing Super Bowl performance, there’s little doubt Mahomes remains the league’s best quarterback, and while he’s dueling Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen for MVPs, he’s really chasing all-time greats like Tom Brady and Joe Montana. But this era of content production that seeks to do the impossible—immortalizing a phenomenon in sports or pop culture in real time—risks accelerating exhaustion just as much as it advances the legacies of even the biggest stars.
We’re approaching an interesting nexus for the 2025 season. Kansas City’s visibility will be as high as any dynasty in American sports history, at a time when the Chiefs are a more boring football product than they’ve ever been in the Mahomes era. Even if your favorite team has been a footnote in the Chiefs’ dynasty-building over the last half decade, or if you believe they get all the calls, or if you’re tired of pregame photos of Taylor Swift in the Arrowhead Stadium tunnel, the reason so many seem to have grown tired of the Chiefs’ schtick is because they’re overexposed. And that’s about to get amplified in 2025, despite the on-field product getting worse in recent years.
The sexy, explosive style of offense from the early years of Mahomes’s career is long gone, and in recent years, they simply haven’t been all that fun to watch. They seemingly only play close, weird games—they won 11 games by eight points or less last season—and rather than reveling in their grittiness or greatness, we’re more often left wondering how they keep getting away with it. The Chiefs finished the 2024 regular season tied for the league’s best record, but were just eighth in offensive DVOA and 12th in defensive DVOA. The Chiefs’ passing game was particularly bad when the offensive line allowed pressure (which was often), and they also had one of the league’s most disappointing rushing attacks.
After getting blown out by Philadelphia in February, it was clear that this team needed to reimagine its approach on offense and find more impact players on defense. But having so much of their cap space tied up in big veteran contracts made it difficult to make major changes this offseason. Instead, they focused on retooling their beleaguered offensive line that was dominated in the Super Bowl. They traded their best lineman, veteran guard Joe Thuney, to Chicago to unload some money and open an opportunity for former second-round pick Kingsley Suamataia to start. They signed former 49ers lineman Jaylon Moore to a short-term deal to be a stopgap left tackle, and used their first-round pick on Ohio State tackle Josh Simmons, who, once healthy, could be the long-term answer at left tackle.
Even if receiver Rashee Rice returns healthy after missing most of last season with a knee injury and takes over as the team’s no. 1 receiver, taking some of the burden off 35-year-old Kelce and helping balance out the touches amongst Kansas City’s playmakers, the offense doesn’t really seem that much better than the unit we saw last season. And the defense is mostly untouched from the group that got torched by the Eagles. The most optimistic read is that Kansas City got a bit younger and more athletic this offseason. The most pragmatic view is that the only way this team can improve is to let their young players develop while on their rookie deals. A more pessimistic view is that the 2025 Chiefs look a lot like the 2024 Chiefs, but with fewer lucky breaks. They’ll be a contender, but an uninspiring one. It's a shame that Kansas City may never get back to the level of explosive play that made the Chiefs the most interesting sports product since the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors.
Still, this is a pivotal moment for Kansas City and for modern NFL history—and perhaps that’s why the league is betting that fans will get over their Chiefs Fatigue and tune in week after week. For all their flaws, the Chiefs are currently no worse than fourth in betting odds to win the Super Bowl. The stakes are high for veteran players, none more than Mahomes. If Kansas City takes a step back in 2025 and fails to make another trip to a conference championship game, Mahomes risks becoming the LeBron James of the NFL, unfairly having his GOAT resume held up and evaluated on a year-by-year basis.
Still, it’s odd that the NFL is investing so heavily in this Kansas City team now, when there are better teams (like the Eagles and Lions) and other exciting quarterbacks like Allen and Jackson and Joe Burrow, or even young passers like Drake Maye and Caleb Williams, who could diversify the prime-time slate. The NFL seems to be assuming that enough fans will be drawn in by the allure of the Chiefs brand, Kelce’s charisma, or Mahomes’s quest for all-time greatness to make this scheduling gambit worth it. But the league shouldn’t be surprised if overindexing on the Chiefs makes some viewers take a page from Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance and turn the TV off.
