If you’re seeking a Week 1 game rife with compelling subplots, look no further than the Chiefs at the Jaguars on Sunday.
The game features the two teams that lost to the Patriots in the past two AFC Championship games.
It, too, represents a showdown between one team that was the revelation of the NFL in 2018 (the AFC West champion Chiefs, the No. 1 seed in the AFC at 12-4) against arguably the most disappointing, underachieving team from last season (the Jaguars, who skidded to 5-11 a year after nearly making it to the Super Bowl).
The quarterbacks?
Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes cemented himself as one of the stars of the league, throwing for 50 touchdowns and 5,097 yards.
Jacksonville will be unveiling the shiny new toy it acquired in the offseason, former Eagles Super Bowl hero Nick Foles, who makes his Jags debut after the team finally parted ways with the maligned Blake Bortles.
Mahomes has started 19 NFL games, including last season’s playoffs, and the Chiefs have scored at least 26 points in all of them.
This is where Sunday gets interesting: The Jaguars were the only team to hold Mahomes to no TD passes in a game last season, and the QB had his lowest passer rating of the season in that game, a 30-14 Kansas City win.
This Chiefs’ offense, however, has improved from the one that led the NFL in total yards and points in 2018, and coach Andy Reid is 4-0 in road openers as Kansas City’s head coach, for whatever that’s worth.
In the matchup between these two teams last season, the Chiefs’ defense, not a strength, picked off Bortles four times.
Bortles, however, is gone and Foles is in — with massive expectations based on his postseason heroics for the Eagles. But the first time Foles left Philadelphia to become a starter, in 2015 with the Rams, it didn’t go so well. He went 4-7.
Though Foles looks like a significant upgrade from Bortles, he never has started more than 11 games in a season and has a 26-18 career record as a starter.
The Jaguars are hoping the offseason hiring of offensive coordinator John DeFilippo, who coached Foles in Philadelphia, will provide added comfort for Jacksonville’s new quarterback.
Countering DeFilippo’s Jags debut is new Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, the former Giants coordinator.
Perhaps even more important to Foles than DeFilippo, though, is Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette, who had a forgettable 2018 after a stellar rookie season in 2017. Fournette averaged just 3.3 yards per carry last year and didn’t have a single 100-yard rushing game. A repeat of that performance will only hinder Foles.
One of the fun personnel matchups in the game figures to be playmaking Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill against Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey, who’s likely to be matched up one-on-one with him. In last year’s game, Hill caught two passes for 46 yards on Ramsey — who has 193 combined tackles, 44 passes defended and nine interceptions in three seasons.
