• If the Kansas City Chiefs win one of their final three games, they’ll become the third team in NFL history to post three 14-win campaigns in a five-year span—joining the San Francisco 49ers of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the New England Patriots of the 2000s. And if they win out, they’ll have 67 wins over that period, giving them more than the other two over five years (of course with a slight boost from the 17-game schedule).
This has been a pretty historic period for the Chiefs and it all starts with Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, and after that, Chris Jones and Travis Kelce.
And while those guys carry more than their weight, the front office deserves credit for building a sustainable model around them—one that consistently features a deep supporting cast. And it’s even more impressive when you really dig into the numbers.
So, over this particular five-year period (from 2020 to ’24), the Chiefs are actually—by one set of internal numbers we obtained—18th in the NFL in cash spending at $1.151 billion. That’s more than $200 million, or a staggering $40 million per year, behind the league-leading Cleveland Browns who spent $1.362 billion over the same stretch. The 49ers ($1.298 billion), Philadelphia Eagles ($1.287 billion), New Orleans Saints ($1.264 billion), Miami Dolphins ($1.259 billion) and Buffalo Bills ($1.251 billion) are all at least $100 million, or $20 million per year, ahead of the Chiefs, too.
Now, there’s a lot of nuance to these numbers. The Browns, Niners, Eagles, Saints, Dolphins and Bills have been aggressive in spending cash over cap—pushing cap charges into the future to facilitate more cash spending now—and their ownership groups deserve credit for it. Other teams, like the Chiefs, take a different approach, whether it’s based on budgets or philosophy, and try to live within real contracts to avoid piling up the cap debt that eventually necessitates a reckoning, which generally comes in the form of a reset year.
Mahomes and DeAndre Hopkins’s contracts are the only ones on the team’s books with void years, the mechanism that buries cap charges in phony seasons at the end of a contract, and Hopkins’s contract was one they traded for. While Mahomes’s deal has been heavily leveraged, the Chiefs know he’s going to be on the team for a long time to come, which gives them the flexibility to push that money out.
Of course, to make this work, the Chiefs have to walk a narrower path with veteran pickups, and nail their draft picks to get key positions filled under cost control. The success of their approach is evidenced in the team’s starting lineup. Seventeen of the team’s 22 starters in Cleveland on Sunday were homegrown. The number for last year’s Super Bowl was 16 of 22 starters.
The result is that there’s no huge bill coming due, and the team has the flexibility to add a guy like Hopkins to its roster on the fly.
The personnel department deserves a lot of credit for this, from GM Brett Veach to assistant GM Mike Borgonzi, SVP of football operations and strategy Chris Shea and former team exec Brandt Tilis (who left for the Carolina Panthers last year), and right down to scouting directors Mike Bradway, Ryne Nutt and Tim Terry. They’ve hit in the draft. They’ve hit on free agents.
Of course, it goes without saying that they are lucky to have Mahomes and Reid to build around. But Reid and Mahomes are pretty lucky to have them, too.
