In an unforgettable Christmas gesture, Travis Kelce has gifted his long-time girlfriend, Taylor Swift, a stunning $13 million Rolls-Royce.
The surprise, which took place during their holiday celebrations, left the pop superstar speechless.
The custom luxury car, a symbol of Kelce’s deep affection for Taylor, is just the latest in a series of sweet gestures from the couple, whose relationship continues to capture hearts worldwide.
Fans are already swooning over the thoughtful and romantic gesture, proving once again that Kelce knows how to make every moment special for Taylor.
The Chiefs have 15 straight wins in one-score games. How do they get away with it?
Kansas City are 12-1 this season and most of those victories have been by a fine margin. But to dismiss the Super Bowl champions as merely fortunate is unfair.
The Kansas City Chiefs have been living a charmed life all season. Coming into Sunday night’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions had already set an NFL record with victories in 14 straight one-score games. And their point differential of +54 was the worst of any 11-1 team in pro football history.
Sunday night was more of the same. The Chiefs got out to a 13-0 lead, and it seemed for a split second that, for once, they would win a game comfortably. Then, the Chargers came back, and there were three lead changes in the fourth quarter – all on field goals. The game-winner was entirely typical for the Chiefs this season: a 31-yard attempt by backup kicker Matthew Wright, who is in for the injured Harrison Butker. Wright’s attempt hooked left, and looked for all the world that it would keep hooking left, leaving Andy Reid’s team on the wrong end of a 17-16 score.
But because this is the 2024 Chiefs, the ball doinked off the left upright, rebounded to the right and the Chiefs won 19-17.
Per OPTAStats, Wright was the third Chiefs kicker this season to make a game-winning field goal as time expired in a game – Wright here, Butker against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 2, and Spencer Shrader against the Carolina Panthers in Week 12. No other NFL team has ever had more than one kicker do so in a regular season in NFL history.
Now, the 12-1 Chiefs have the worst point differential for any team ever with that record (+56), and they’ve extended their all-time streak of 15 straight wins in one-score games.
If the Chiefs were as good as you’d expect a Super Bowl champion to be, this would still be ridiculous – the kinds of thing Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots got away with (legally and otherwise) for the better part of two decades. But, at least on the surface, this Chiefs team is weaker than the ones that won Super Bowls in three of the last five seasons.
The Chiefs have been cycling through starting running backs, receivers, and offensive tackles this season. Steve Spagnuolo’s defense, which was the primary reason Kansas City even got to last year’s Super Bowl, has fallen off a cliff of late due to injuries and personnel issues. And still, when everything counts, there are 31 NFL teams left wondering just what black magic the Chiefs got themselves into, and where they can get some themselves.
It’s time to look under the hood and see what is powering the Chiefs’ run.
Patrick Mahomes’s chemistry with Travis Kelce
Kelce is in his 12th NFL season, and the attrition shows. He is not as fast or physically dominant as he used to be. But the mind-meld he has built over time with Mahomes, who is now in his eighth season, shows up over and over again in pivotal moments. After the win over the Chargers, Andy Reid highlighted one play that swung things in the Chiefs’ direction. With two minutes left in the game, Kansas City had the ball on the Chargers’ 20-yard line. It was third-and-seven, and while Wright might have made the game-winner from that field position anyway, the Chiefs had another issue – they wanted to run the clock down so that the Chargers would not have a chance to score again.
The original play gave Mahomes the option to throw the ball to running back Samaje Perine, or run the ball himself. But when the Chargers dropped into inverted Cover-2 – in which the cornerbacks drop back to take safety responsibilities – Mahomes saw another option, and that was to hit Kelce for a short completion of nine yards, something he did with ease. Mahomes then knelt twice to bleed the clock down, and Reid called the timeout with one second left before Wright made the game-winning kick.
“I mean, I have trust in Pat making those kinds of plays,” Reid said. “He kind of said that before the play, just … ‘I’ll make something happen.’”
As usual, Mahomes did. And these plays are about more than random schoolyard football. When you do it this often and this consistently, it’s really about two all-time great players who know each other’s minds, and a head coach who believes in them.
The Chiefs are ridiculously good on third down
Speaking of successful conversions, as inconsistent as the Chiefs have been on both sides of the ball, they have the NFL’s most dominant offense on third down, which allows them to sustain drives despite the near-total absence of explosive plays. Expected Points Added (EPA) is a metric that measures how well a team performs compared to expectations on a play-to-play basis. This season, the Chiefs rank 12th in offensive EPA per play on first down (-0.01), 17th on second down (-0.08), and first on third down (+0.29).
What does that mean in a practical sense? The Chiefs have had 194 third downs this season, and they’ve converted 101 into firsts. That conversion rate of 52.1% is the NFL’s best. And it showed up on that game-winning drive against the Chargers. With 4:20 left, the Chiefs had third-and-10 at their own 40-yard line after two straight Mahomes incompletions. Here, the Chargers dropped into Cover-3 (zone with a single-high safety), and sent a four-man rush at Mahomes with defenders in all the right places in coverage. Of course, Mahomes put on his wizard hat, and countered with an unreal 14-yard completion to Xavier Worthy.
Oh, and there’s more: the Chiefs rank third in offensive EPA per play on fourth down (+1.46, behind only the Washington Commanders and the Buffalo Bills), when things go that far.
Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo offer words of encouragement to Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert after Sunday’s game. Photograph: Jon Robichaud/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
