Jesse Newell at The Athletic asked in July whether the 2025 Chiefs were cursed — and if the luck could turn ("Were the Chiefs cursed in 2025? How their luck could change — and where it might not," The Athletic, 2026-07-15). It's a good question, so we went back to our own nflfastR play-by-play and rebuilt every claim from scratch.

The short version: this was one of the flukiest 6-11 seasons on record, and most of the pain is in a single line item.

The one number

Kansas City went 1-9 in one-score games (margin ≤ 8 points) in 2025. They played ten of them — more than half their schedule. They won one. That is the entire distance between the team the standings said they were and the team the point differential said they were.

The point differential was not the differential of a 6-11 football team. The Chiefs scored 362 points and allowed 328 across 17 games — a +34 net. Plug that into a standard Pythagorean expectation (exponent 2.37) and you get an expected win percentage of roughly .557, or about 9.5 wins.

So the ledger is: 6 actual wins vs. ~9–10 expected from scoring, a gap of three to four wins entirely absorbed by close-game outcomes.

How rare is that? Only one other team since 1999 — the 2008 Packers (6-10, +39) — has ever finished with ≤6 wins while outscoring opponents by +30 or more over a full slate.

The 2025 Chiefs are the second entry on a two-team list going back a quarter century.

Table of Contents

1. The one-score record and why it regresses
2. EPA says: an average team, not a bad one
3. Turnovers: bad on defense, but the offense was actually lucky
4. Opponent field-goal luck: an absurd 96.9%
5. What I'd expect to bounce back in 2026 — and what won't

1. The one-score record and why it regresses

Decades of public data show that one-score records are close to a coin flip and don't persist year over year — teams that go 1-9 in one-score games one season are, in expectation, around .500 in them the next.

Here is what those ten games looked like — a parade of 3- to 8-point losses:

Nine losses, seven of them by one score, four of them by exactly three points. If even three of those swing — the historical base rate — this is a 9-8 or 10-7 team.

EPA says KC was an average team, not a bad one

If the record is 6-11 and the point differential is +34, EPA is the tiebreaker. Ours puts the Chiefs squarely in the middle:

• Offense: +0.035 EPA/play — 11th of 32.
• Defense: −0.020 EPA/play allowed — 12th of 32.
• Net EPA: +0.055 — 12th of 32.

That's not a contender. It's also not a bottom-tier team. For scale, the Rams led the league at +0.191 net EPA/play, and the Jets bottomed out at −0.274. Kansas City finished closer to the top than the bottom, but they were nowhere near the elite tiers of Los Angeles, New England (+0.180), Seattle (+0.169), or Buffalo (+0.148). This was a decline: the 2022 Chiefs' offense was +0.187 EPA/play; in 2025 it was +0.035. That is a real, measurable step down on offense.

The defense, though, is trending the right way — from +0.025 EPA/play allowed (worse than average) in 2024 to −0.020 in 2025.

3. Turnovers: bad on defense, but the offense was actually lucky

Defensive takeaways were genuinely thin. The Chiefs forced 13 turnovers on 977 defensive plays — a 1.33% takeaway rate, which ranked 26th of 32. Houston led the league at 2.91%. Some of that is skill (KC's defense doesn't create pressure the way the top units do), but takeaway rate is one of the noisiest year-to-year defensive stats in football, and 26th is a floor you'd expect to climb off of.

But on offense, the Chiefs were lucky, not unlucky. They put the ball on the ground 17 times and lost only 3 of them — a fumble-lost rate of 17.6%. The league recovered its own fumbles at a 46.3% loss rate (266 lost of 575 total fumbled). Fumble recoveries are close to a 50/50 coin flip — the leaguewide rate confirms it — so KC's offense benefited from something like 5 extra fumble recoveries beyond expectation. That is roughly a full game of hidden points sitting on the positive side of the ledger.

On defense they were slightly unlucky in the mirror image: 14 opponent fumbles, only 6 recovered (42.9%). Small sample, close to expectation.

Net turnover margin: −2 (13 takeaways, 15 giveaways). Bad, but not the historically catastrophic number a 6-11 season implies — and the fumble-luck component of it was, on balance, in KC's favor.

4. Opponent field-goal luck: an absurd 96.9%

The Athletic flagged opponent field-goal luck.

Against the Chiefs, kickers went 31-for-32 on field goals — 96.9%. Across the entire NFL in 2025, kickers made 976 of 1,140 attempts (85.6%). Opponents hit at more than 11 percentage points above league average against Kansas City, missing exactly one kick all year.

At 32 attempts, the expected miss count at league rate is about 4.6. KC got one. That is somewhere between 3 and 4 free field goals — call it ~10-11 points — that a league-average opposing kicking performance would have taken off the board. In a season decided by three-point losses, this alone is plausibly worth a win.

(For symmetry: KC's own kicker went 33-for-38, 86.8% — league average)

5. What may bounce back in 2026 — and what won't

Sorting the ledger into "luck" vs. "real":

Should regress toward the mean (in KC's favor):

• One-score record. 1-9 → something closer to 5-5 is the base rate. Worth ~3 wins on its own.
• Opponent FG%. 96.9% is not a repeatable defensive property. League average would have prevented an estimated 3+ opponent field goals.
• Defensive takeaway rate. 26th in the league on 977 plays is a small sample of a noisy stat; some improvement is likely even holding the personnel constant.

Should regress against KC:

• Offensive fumble recovery luck. 17.6% fumble-lost rate vs. 46% league norm gave them ~5 phantom possessions. That evaporates in 2026.

Real, not luck:

• The offense was no longer elite. +0.035 EPA/play (11th) is a long way from the +0.19 peak.
• The defense is fine, not dominant. 12th in EPA/play allowed, with a genuine takeaway problem.

The Athletic's framing was right on direction: the 2025 Chiefs were unlucky, in the ways their piece identified. Our numbers just make the size of it hard to argue with — three to four wins of variance, sitting on top of a team whose real level is "average," not "sixth worst in football."

They weren't cursed. They were a middling team that lost every coin flip.