"We kept it close to make sure you guys are watching at home."
The Kansas City Chiefs are well aware of how often they have to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
After doing so on Friday against the Las Vegas Raiders, star defensive lineman Chris Jones could only joke about why they again weren’t able to pull away from a team inferior to them on paper.
For a team that is now 11-1 on the season, the Chiefs have had an incredible amount of close calls that very easily could have gone the other way. Whether it be a blocked game-winning kick in Week 10 against the Broncos, a questionable pass interference call setting up a game-winning kick in Week 2 against the Bengals, or a failed fourth down conversation in the red zone in Week 3 against the Atlanta Falcons, the Chiefs have been on the right side of every close game they have played in this season. And there have been a lot of them.
Nine of Kansas City’s 11 wins on the year have been in one-score games. This was the case again on Friday against the Raiders, avoiding a loss when an errant snap from Raiders center Jackson Powers-Johnson resulted in a fumble recovery to thwart a last-second comeback attempt late in the fourth quarter.
Patrick Mahomes has been adamant that the Chiefs need to find ways to better pull away from teams. But at least how they are currently operating, the Chiefs seem largely incapable of doing so.
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There is also another theory, which has been quite popular amongst the minority of conspiracy theorists of NFL fans, that the Chiefs perhaps keep games close in order to generate ratings.
Jones leaned into this narrative after the game in what seemed to be a joking manner, claiming that the Chiefs kept this one close to “make sure you guys are watching at home”.
“We kept it close to make sure you guys are watching at home,” Jones told the Amazon Prime Video studio team after the game, which was retrieved by Charles Goldman of A to Z Sports. “We want to keep the ratings high.”
Obviously, playing with fire as much as the Chiefs have done this season would make no sense for them to do intentionally unless you do believe that networks are indeed telling them to do so, which would be quite hard to believe.
That being said, Amazon Prime Video, which was the broadcast host of the Black Friday game, likely isn’t complaining that this matchup was a close one until the end.
Last year, we saw what a largely non-competitive Black Friday game did to negatively affect ratings for Amazon. The 34-13 win for the Dolphins versus the New York Jets last season brought in an average of just 9.61 million viewers, which was well below the average for an Amazon Thursday Night Football broadcast last year.
Chances are when the viewership numbers are revealed, this year’s Black Friday game will indeed end up far outperforming last year’s from a viewership perspective. Whether you believe that this game was kept intentionally close in order to do so or not…
