Chiefs Improve to 5-0 as Offense Nears Dynastic Peak

The Kansas City Chiefs moved to 5-0 on the season with a 22-6 win over the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday, and advanced analytics suggest Patrick Mahomes' offense is closer to its 2018-2022 form than it has been in three seasons, according to NBC News.

How did the Chiefs beat the Chargers?

Kansas City held Los Angeles to six points in the victory, improving to 5-0 for the season, NBC News reported. Running back Kenneth Walker III scored a rushing touchdown in the game, part of a performance that helped push Kansas City's rushing efficiency to one of its best marks of the decade.

What do the numbers say about the offense's revival?

Entering Week 6, the Chiefs ranked fourth in the NFL in expected points added (EPA) per play on offense — which would be the team's best finish since the 2022 season — and second in EPA per rush, which would be its best mark this decade, according to data cited by NBC News from RBSDM.com, an advanced football analytics site.

Those figures mark a sharp reversal from the prior three years. From 2023 through 2025, Kansas City ranked just 10th in offensive EPA, a step back from the dominance of Mahomes' first five seasons as starter. From 2018 through 2022, the Chiefs led the NFL in offensive EPA per play, a stretch that produced two Super Bowl titles and two regular-season MVP awards for Mahomes, per the same analytics source.

Why does this stretch matter after last season?

The three-year dip in offensive efficiency came even as Kansas City won a championship, but it also included what NBC News described as a "humiliating Super Bowl loss in which their offense crumbled." Last season was rockier still: the Chiefs started 6-7 before Mahomes tore an ACL and the team missed the playoffs entirely, according to the report.

Against that backdrop, Sunday's win puts Mahomes and the Chiefs at 5-0 for only the third time in his career, NBC News reported, with the offense now statistically resembling the unit that once ran roughshod over the league rather than the version that labored through the past three seasons.

What is still unresolved about the comparison?

The current ranking — fourth in EPA per play through five games — is a snapshot, not a season-long verdict, and the Chiefs' 2018-2022 dominance was sustained over five full years of first-place finishes in that metric, per RBSDM.com data cited by NBC News. Whether Kansas City's offense maintains fourth-place efficiency, let alone approaches the first-place standard of the Mahomes-MVP years, will depend on results over the remaining 12 games.

For now, the record and the underlying numbers both point in the same direction: a Chiefs offense that looks more like the one from Mahomes' early seasons than the one that stumbled through 2023, 2024 and part of 2025, NBC News reported.