At the midway point, is the '14 Chiefs' 5-3 more impressive than last year's 8-0?

By foxsports
Published

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- If you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, should we judge teams by the quality of the quarterbacks they've clobbered? Take last year's first-half-of-the-season hit list for the Kansas City Chiefs:

Blaine Gabbert.

Tony Romo.

Michael Vick.

Eli Manning.

Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Terrelle Pryor.

Case Keenum.

Jason Campbell.

Average career NFL starts: 74.3. Average career NFL touchdowns thrown: 101.6.

Now compare that with this year's:

Flip through our photo album of NFL cheerleaders.

Ryan Tannehill.

Tom Brady.

Philip Rivers.

Austin Davis.

Michael Vick (reprise).

Average career NFL starts: 100.8. Average career NFL touchdowns thrown: 162.4.

It's one thing to take out a row of chumps; it's something else when you're doing it to champ after champ after champ. Since being humbled during Week 3 and Week 4, respectively, by the Chiefs, the Dolphins and Patriots have won nine of 10 combined. Last fall's Week 3 and Week 4 victims, the Eagles and Giants, by comparison, went 5-5 in the 10 games after the Andy Gang took 'em out behind the woodshed.

All of which may answer the question: Is this Chiefs team, at the midway point of the season, actually better than the one from last year at this same juncture? Is 2014's 5-3 more impressive, given the dance card, than 2013's 8-0?

At least one database sure as hell thinks so: ProFootballReference.com slots the Chiefs as tied for the third-best team in the AFC right now, according to the site's Simple Rating System, or SRS, which assigns a team a number relative to how much better or worse it is relative to average (0.0). Kansas City opened the week with an 8.8 SRS, same as Indianapolis and behind only Denver (10.6) and New England (9.6) in the conference.

And get this: The Chiefs' SRS, if it held up, would be the franchise's highest since the 1962 Dallas Texans (11-3, AFL champs, 9.8 SRS) and the highest by a Kansas City-based club since Hank Stram's 1967 crew (9-5, 10.3 SRS). At the moment, PFR ranks the 2014 Chiefs as the sixth-best team in club history, which:

a) is more than a little mind-blowing;

b) probably has more to do with whom they've beaten and, in the case of the Patriots, by how much. Still ...

"It's just a good situation for us young guys to see great quarterbacks out there early," Chiefs defensive back Ron Parker, one of those unsung defenders who've kept on rocking the casbah, told FOXSportsKansasCity.com.

"That way, when we get later in the season, we don't have the jitterbugs. We'll be like, 'We've already faced these guys before, we can go out there and play, we've played against the best.'"

Which is a backhanded way of saying that yeah, Gabbert and Keenum, while fun to knock senseless, were somewhat less-than-adequate tuneups for the quality of quarterback you usually run into in the postseason.

And, sure enough, national media and skeptics derided up last fall's 8-0 start as a mirage padded by a kind schedule (only one of those aforementioned teams the Chiefs faced over the first half of the year -- the Eagles -- wound up reaching the postseason) and a run of mediocre to subpar signal-callers. In hindsight, much as it stung, they weren't that far off: When the Andy Gang had to deal with Peyton Manning twice, Rivers twice and Andrew Luck twice over their final eight contests, they went 0-6 in those meetings, a 9-0 cushion fading into an 11-5 wild-card berth and another soul-crushing playoff exit.

At any rate, that was then. This is now. Tight end Travis Kelce has become that viable second mid-to-deep receiving threat to complement Dwayne Bowe; De'Anthony Thomas is even faster in person than he is on your video-game console; Cairo Santos has found his happy kicking place again; an offensive line made up of youth and spare parts is getting more cohesive by the week; and "depth" players at linebacker and in the secondary such as Josh Mauga and Parker have held their own after injuries thrust them to the center of the stage.

So if beating up on Jason Campbell breeds false hope, does beating up on Tom Brady instill blind faith?

"It just kind of boosts our confidence, man," Parker continued. "And it just makes us play a whole lot better and faster playing the good quarterbacks earlier in the year versus playing them at the end of the year.

"It's more a type of difference with game-planning and scheming and things like that when we're playing a team at the beginning of the year (as opposed to) the end of the year."

And here we are, at the midway point, staring ahead to who-knows-what. However you want to slice it, though, something special has been brewing on the Chiefs' side of the parking lot, percolating under the radar while baseball stole the national stage. How special, well, we're all about to find out. 

You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.