The Raiders beat the Chiefs 14-12 last January without either team scoring a touchdown, and won it on a 60-yard field goal on the final play. It is one of the oddest results in a rivalry that goes back to 1960, and every strange part of it has a plain explanation.
They meet again this Sunday, 4 October, in Las Vegas. Before they do, it is worth taking that last game apart, because it is a neat lesson in how a football game can be decided by the parts nobody usually watches.
Decoded Takeaway: Twelve points, no touchdowns
Start with the Chiefs’ 12. You can reach 12 points without a touchdown in more than one way, and this game did it the hard way: four field goals.
A field goal is worth three, a touchdown six, so four kicks equals two touchdowns’ worth of points and not one of them needed the end zone. Every way to put points on the board is on the scoring guide, but the point here is simple: a team can stay in a game all afternoon on field goals alone. Kansas City did, and still lost.
Decoded Takeaway: You can score 12 and never once reach the end zone.
Why the Chiefs could not finish
So why only field goals? Because of who was throwing the passes.
Kansas City’s starting quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, had been lost for the season with a knee injury. His backup had gone down too. By January the Chiefs were on their fourth-choice quarterback, a player who would normally never see the field.
The quarterback is the most important attacking player, the one who touches the ball on nearly every play. Drop to your fourth one and the offence can still move between the 20-yard lines and get close enough to kick, but it stops finishing drives with touchdowns. Four field goals and no touchdowns is exactly what a stripped-down offence looks like. If you want why the position matters this much, the positions guide explains what each player does.
Decoded Takeaway: A team’s whole season can hinge on one player, and this was the proof.
The safety, and the other odd two points
The Raiders’ 14 included a safety, the rarest score in the game, worth two points to the defence for trapping the other team behind their own goal line.
In a game this starved of points, that safety mattered. Two points is a field goal’s worth of margin, handed over without the offence even having the ball. I have unpacked how a safety works in its own piece, because it is the one score most newcomers have never had explained.
Decoded Takeaway: In a low-scoring game, the rarest two points can be the difference.
The 60-yard kick to win it
Then the ending. A 60-yard field goal on the final play.
Sixty yards is near the outer limit of what an NFL kicker can do. Most attempts happen from inside 50, and the success rate falls off a cliff as the distance grows, because the kicker has to generate both height and range on a ball that has to clear a defensive rush and drop between the posts. A made 60-yarder is one of the hardest routine-looking plays in the sport. To land one to win a game, on the last play, is about as much pressure as the job carries.
That kick won the game on the final play. How a rivalry the Raiders once led turned the Chiefs’ way is the story on the Chiefs v Raiders rivalry page.
What it tells you before Sunday
Put the pieces together and the game was not a fluke, it was a stack of them: a fourth-string quarterback who could not find the end zone, a defence that stole two points, and a kicker who did the near-impossible when it counted.
The Chiefs were the better team on paper that season and lost anyway. That is the honest lesson of a rivalry game, and it is why the record between these two has swung so far, so often, across 66 years: the standings tell you who is probably better over a season, never who wins one afternoon in this fixture.
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