Can’t believe we’re already in week 15 of this season. The games have been a ride with all the drama in the Eagles and Niners’ locker room. The Cowboys-Bengals game? That was something else. The unsurprising Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City Chiefs win against the Chargers. However, the Chiefs followed that field goal fiesta with something astonishing.
Week 14 had 2,115 plays and 23 of them resulted in fines. But each individual fine is a hefty chunk of cash. NFL charged three of the Chiefs, RB Isiah Pacheco, WR Juju Smith-Schuster, and guard Trey Smith, with unnecessary roughness, giving them a piece of their own medicine. The fine that Pacheco picked up was monumental. But before we talk about that, let’s get the simpler things out of the way first.
Patrick Mahomes’ teammates get dinged by the NFL
Trey Smith was charged with unnecessary roughness (use of the helmet) and racked up $18.8k in fines as a result. This happened in the fourth quarter with 13:38 remaining on the clock. All the while Juju Smith-Schuster was charged with the same penalty, but his fine is nearly one-third of what Trey Smith has to cough up. Smith-Shuster would pay $6,722 to the league.
NFL fined Smith-Schuster for a play in the second quarter with 11:20 left to play. Astonishingly, the Chargers had a pretty clean game and none of the Bolts got punished like the Kansas City Chiefs. Well, the silver lining is that the Chiefs have 15 straight wins in one-score games.
As pointed out by The Athletic, the victory over the Chargers was Kansas City’s fourth of the season by one or two points, a total exceeded just once over a full season in the 105-year history of the NFL. The 1989 Green Bay Packers did it five times and finished 10-6, per Pro Football Reference. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the colossal hit that Isiah Pacheco took off the field after week 14’s culmination.
What did Isiah Pacheco even do?
The Kansas City Chiefs running back was fined $45,020 for unnecessary roughness (use of the helmet). The crazy thing is, no flag was thrown on the play. KC was leading 6-0 in the first quarter when Mahomes lobbed a pass to Pacheco on 1 and 14 with 6:20 remaining on the clock. The RB caught the ball, sprinted, and bumped headfirst into Chargers cornerback Kristian Fulton.
If you go through the list of players who were fined, Pacheco and Rachaad White of the Buccaneers are up on the leaderboard ($45,020). White was also fined for the same thing. It’s insane how three players got fined for the exact same thing, but the amount differed vastly. Maybe it’s the intensity of roughness that matters.
The Chiefs are 12-1 now, but somehow, the season feels so underwhelming. The Chiefs clinched their ninth straight AFC West crown. The last time they had a similar record was in the 2020 season when the KC team made the Super Bowl and eventually lost to Tom Brady’s Buccaneers. What happens this year remains to be seen.
