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The Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving loss revealed major issues from Amon-Ra St. Brown’s injury to offensive regression and Dan Campbell’s costly decisions

Following the Kansas City Chiefs’ ugly 31-28 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, Arrowhead Pride user Belohawks scoured the Internet for the most appropriate news headlines. Chiefs Kingdom News: Black Friday Arrives Early Unhappy Thanksgiving is hard to swallow. Short Week Meets Tall Task Excess waste leads to narrow loss. Slim Pickens for Playoffs Mathematically speaking… we’re doomed! Silenced by the Lamb Dallas receiver ate defensive backs’ livers with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Static Interference by Referees Ruins Game Those turkeys misjudged the season of giving. Ethical Discussion: Is It Morally Acceptable for a Schottenheimer to Defeat the Chiefs? Epistemic and Ontological Implications Abound Dome Not Home for Patrick Homecoming is unfamiliar disappointment. White-on-White a Crime Uniformly, these are bad luck. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Join Salvation Army in Stomping Out Poverty Next half-time show: Hooters Girls and Goodwill.

Late in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day — when most of us were nearly comatose after feasting on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes (and about 16 1/2 slices of pie), the Kansas City Chiefs faced off against Dallas. As we have seen over and over this season, the Chiefs failed to make crucial plays when they needed them most. Specifically, these included stopping Dallas’ one-two punch: wide receivers CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens. With the team’s 31-28 loss, Kansas City not only lost the Preston Road Trophy, but its third game of the last four — falling to 6-6 on the season. Here are five things we learned from Thursday’s ugly loss. 1. The Chiefs’ secondary is good — but not great This isn’t a bad thing. It simply is what it is. There are parts of this team that drastically need improvement. That’s not the case with the secondary. If the Chiefs had an awesome pass rush, this might not matter as much. But they don’t. The secondary has two main problems: Join the conversation! Sign up for a user account and get: Fewer ads Create community posts Comment on articles, community posts Rec comments, community posts Coming soon: New, improved notifications system! Cornerback Trent McDuffie is awesome, but he is also 5 feet 11 and 193 pounds. So he struggles when he’s up against bigger, elite players like Lamb — who is three inches taller. This may not seem like much, but NFL football is a game of inches. It can be the difference between shutting a guy down and getting roasted to the tune of seven catches for 112 yards and a touchdown. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s defense needs an elite safety. Having great safeties like Justin Reid (and before him, Tyrann Mathieu) allowed the defense to work the way Spagnuolo intends. He likes to blitz his cornerbacks — so when he does, he’s trusting his safeties to pick up the receivers. In Thursday’s game, this meant that sometimes, Chamarri Conner was covering Lamb — with late-arriving help from Jaden Hicks. Neither of those players is at Reid or Mathieu’s level. Kansas City needs to invest in a blue-chip safety to captain the secondary — or fix its pass rush so it doesn’t have to blitz defensive backs. 2. The Chiefs are tired The Chiefs are not bad. They are exhausted. They are not worn out from playing on a short week. They are worn out from playing in three straight Super Bowls — and battling through one nail-biter after another. You could see it on quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ face as he sat on the sideline watching the game slip away. This team looks like a legion of warriors who’ve been out on an endless campaign without reinforcements. Since 2018 (including the playoffs), the Chiefs have played 149 games. That’s 18 more than half of the league’s teams. That’s more than a whole extra season of tough games won and lost — and in those high-stakes, win-or-go-home matchups, Kansas City’s players pushed their bodies to unimaginable extremes. I don’t think this team has lost the will to fight. But there is only so much a human body can take before it fails the spirit within it. 3. The Chiefs’ offensive line is cursed I don’t know what deal Kansas City made with the devil to get Mahomes as its quarterback, but it must have involved annually sacrificing the bodies of its offensive linemen so the team’s Icarus (Mahomes, of course) could never fly too close to the sun. Already without right guard Trey Smith — who missed Thursday’s game with a high ankle sprain — the Chiefs are now without both of their starting offensive tackles for an unknown period. We are still waiting on details of the extent of right tackle Jawaan Taylor’s triceps injury, but the Kansas City Star’s Pete Sweeney reported that after the game, rookie left tackle Josh Simmons was wearing a cast and had his arm in a sling. This is bad news — because in Week 14, Kansas City will face the Houston Texans, who boast one of the league’s best pass rushes. 4. The Chiefs are still in it, but they’re not really still in it To…

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