Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith has come in for a lot of criticism as the Chiefs have slipped from 5-0 to 6-6 over their last seven games, but he looked just fine on Sunday against the Jets.
Smith threw four touchdowns and had a 70-yard run in the 38-31 loss, which meant that the Chiefs had to look elsewhere when assigning blame for their latest defeat. One obvious place to look would be the defense, which allowed the Jets to rack up 488 yards while scoring on seven of their nine possessions.
The last of those possessions was an extended one as the Jets ran 10 plays inside the Kansas City 10-yard-line due to penalties that set up Josh McCown’s go-ahead touchdown. Smith hit Tyreek Hill for a long gain to give the Chiefs a chance, but an incompletion on a fourth down throw to tight end Travis Kelce left the Chiefs with a loss and Smith looking for a flag that never came.
“I just felt like there had been a bunch of contact on Kelce all day,” Smith said in comments distributed by the team. “Everywhere he went, shallow, vertical, he was getting a lot of attention and a lot of physical play. It felt like we couldn’t get a single call and then to watch the end of the game and what happened there as he was scrambling around and they were still throwing out defensive holding calls, I thought was tough. I mean, it’s a bang-bang play. I know those guys have a job to do to, but I just felt that there given the circumstances and the magnitude of that play.”
Kelce agreed with Smith, saying, via the Kansas City Star, that the Jets “got a little help from the refs at the end.” The Jets also did plenty to help themselves over the course of the afternoon and the Chiefs have to figure out a way to do that if they’re going to end a slide that now finds them in a three-way tie at the top of the AFC West.