The Kansas City Chiefs are already attempting to navigate an injury to their most important player, with a clearly limited Patrick Mahomes insisting on not missing a single game despite suffering a mild high ankle sprain last weekend. Mahomes did well enough to get a win against the Houston Texans on Sunday, but with a short week on tap ahead of a Christmas Day showdown with the Pittsburgh Steelers, K.C. shouldn’t allow their second-most important player to follow his lead.
There’s some good news and bad news in regards to defensive lineman Chris Jones, who left Sunday’s victory with a leg injury. The good news: According to FOX’s Jay Glazer, MRI results revealed that Jones suffered a only Grade 1 calf strain, which is just about the best diagnosis possible given how bad the injury looked in real time. The bad news, though? That diagnosis might just be good enough to trick Jones, and the Chiefs, into playing with fire.
The Chiefs still have plenty to play for over the last two weeks of the regular season. The Buffalo Bills are two games back in the race for the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs, but Josh Allen and Co. have a significantly easier remaining schedule, with divisional matchups against the New England Patriots and New York Jets. Kansas City, meanwhile, has Pittsburgh this week before closing the year with a road trip to the Denver Broncos.
Given that Buffalo already has the head-to-head tiebreaker, the Bills going 2-0 and snagging home-field advantage is hardly out of the question. But the Chiefs can’t be worried about that right now. Kansas City has a historically unprecedented short week ahead of it, and the risk is simply too great to allow Jones to try and follow Mahomes’ lead.
According to Glazer’s report, Jones would be a far better bet to suit up were the Chiefs playing on Sunday rather than Wednesday. But, however misguided Roger Goodell’s Christmas Day Netflix experiment may be, the schedule is what it is at this point. And it leaves Kansas City with a decision to make: Let Jones talk his way into the starting lineup in an effort to make sure the AFC playoffs run through Arrowhead, or roll the dice to ensure that your defensive lodestar is as close to 100 percent as possible ahead of the chase for a Super Bowl threepeat.
Mahomes has talked a big game about playing through pain, and his play on Sunday backed that up admirably. But there comes a time when the warrior mindset does more harm than good; the Chiefs may well beat an ailing Steelers team anyway, and with just three days to prepare, Jones is too important to lose sight of the long-term.
