Nix Degrees of Separation: An AFC West Preview

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**Mina Kimes** (0:34)
Welcome back to The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny.
Only NFL podcast. One of the hosts heard me talking about Kenneth Walker and said, that's funny. I call Mina Lenny Walker. That's Lenny. I mean, Kenneth Walker time, AFC West. Here to join me for the first time. Very exciting. I always love having a first time guest, Hayden Winks of now the Yahoo!
Fantasy football show just happened. We were traded.

**Hayden Winks** (1:02)
I was traded.

**Mina Kimes** (1:02)
Yeah.

**Hayden Winks** (1:03)
Exciting times over here. The industry is beyond crazy, but it's always a blessing to talk some football on here and got lots of Kenneth Walker notes.
Yeah. What a stacked division too.

**Mina Kimes** (1:14)
Yeah. I'm really looking forward to doing this because I've been doing these power rankings pods and the next one comes out Monday with Bill Simmons. And I had the Chiefs ranked really low. And then while doing the prep for this, I started like second guessing that in a pretty big way. And you know, because I was thinking like, okay, the Chiefs are in retreat, the Chargers are rising, the Broncos have one of the best rosters in football, the Raiders are, you know, it's a different kind of per season for them. But the more I worked on the Chiefs, the more I felt like there's a potential to look really stupid for thinking that they're going to have a lost season. So let's start with them because I actually also haven't talked about them that much this off season. I don't know if you guys like I, I don't know because they didn't make top 10 or 10 offices, top 10 offices or defenses pod, which again, the Chiefs could totally have a top 10 offense, right? And we could look completely dumb.
And I feel like the Chargers have the shiny new thing with Mike McDaniel and the Broncos have Jalen Waddle. I'm really excited to get into that and the Raiders have the new quarterback. But the Chiefs, you know, it's like, what has there really been to talk about? And then as I looked at this, Hayden, I was thinking like, actually, there's a lot to talk about. And I'm kind of intrigued by this team.

**Hayden Winks** (2:28)
Yeah, I see it the same way. There's still a lot of moving pieces. Their entire defensive secondary is pretty much all new. They added two picks in the first and second round to help out in the defensive line. And then whatever we're calling the Rashi Rice offseason, the Homes coming off torn ACL, Xavier Worthy is not rehabbing a shoulder injury.
And then the enemy is back. And then plus their two tackles are pretty inexperienced. So this team is, I think, pretty difficult to get a good read on. I ended up calling them the most fragile of the top three in this division. I can see how this thing goes right. But I do think there's more question marks with them than the other two.

**Mina Kimes** (3:04)
They're also a classic positive regression case because of how badly they did, how historically badly they were in close games last year. One in nine in one score games.
I was just looking at FTN football almanac, which I encourage everyone to check out as always for some of those stats. And another thing that I didn't, I think I'd forgotten this perhaps, only one miss on opponent field goals last year, which again is another thing that's not likely to happen again in terms of regression. In fact, they do, FDN always publishes Pythagorean Wins, which is basically what the team's record should have been based on point differential. And the Chiefs finished six and 11, but they actually should have been a nine and a half win team, according to FDN. So like, do you hear that and think, okay, maybe Patrick Mahomes should have been 9.5 wins. We're all nationally way too low on this team.

**Hayden Winks** (3:58)
Yeah, and then also like the last three games, I mean, they were completely unwatchable after Mahomes wasn't out there.