Ahead of the Kansas City Chiefs’ season finale against the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 18, the team’s three coordinators took questions from the press for the final time during the 2025 season.
Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo assured his listeners that even though neither team has a playoff stake in this game, there will be plenty at stake in Las Vegas.
“We’re fighting for some things in this last game that we want to hang our hat on,” he explained. “I’m not a big stat guy — I don’t go into them
— but I hear the guys talking about it, so there’s a lot of pride there in this last game.”
The Chiefs are one of only six NFL teams that have allowed less than 20 points per game this season. If that holds, it would be the third consecutive season Kansas City has hit that benchmark — after a stretch of three years allowing 22 points per game.
With only a 6-10 record to show for it, a celebration may not be warranted. Still, Spagnuolo’s unit was a key reason many of the Chiefs’ battles remained close.
“There were some really good stretches of defense,” he noted. “I go back to the Indianapolis Colts game where we had those five or six straight three-and-outs. There were some games in there where we played winning football and helped our team get in a position to win.”
Unfortunately, Kansas City had a 1-8 record in one-score games.
“What was disappointing — I haven’t gone back and reflected on all of it — was some end-of-game defense that I would have liked to have back,” said Spagnuolo. “If we could have found a way to make one play towards the end of the game, it either would have given our offense the ball back or we would have found a way to win the game. That more than anything sticks out. If we can get better at that, I’ll be happy.”
The Chiefs’ special teams coordinator Dave Toub shared that sentiment from a different perspective.
“We just didn’t make plays,” he told reporters. “We just couldn’t get a game where we made plays to win the game — and I’m just speaking on my end of it. In the past, we’ve done that a lot of times. The way we started out in Brazil — with the fast field goal that we did? That was awesome. That was cutting-edge… then [Harrison] Butker ends up missing five kicks in September. That was like a Debbie Downer right there.”
Among the nine kicks Butker has missed in the 2025 season, five occurred in September. That set up the veteran kicker for criticism throughout the year.
“It says something that he got off to a bad start,” said Toub, “[and] then it was always there: the doubt, ‘Is he going to make it or is he not?’ Then he had a good string in October and November [before] it popped up again in December. That’s kind of how the year went for us.”
But there were some bright spots in Toub’s evaluation of the season.
“I think now we finally cracked the top-10 as far as our kickoff goes,” he said. “We had a lot of young players — and they just keep getting better and better — so I’m happy with that. Kickoff return… not where I wanted it to be at this point. We’re probably in the middle of the pack, towards the 20s there, and that’s just not good enough; we have to do a better job getting some bigger returns in kick return.”
In Week 17, rookie running back Brashard Smith fielded the first two punt returns of his career. He navigated traffic to gain 44 yards on the second, garnering excitement from Toub. Smith could be the solution to a more significant return game.
On the flip side, Kansas City’s kickoff and punt coverage teams have a notable streak through 16 games that everybody would like to keep.
“We didn’t give up anything big,” explained Toub. “We still have another game left, but we didn’t give up a touchdown to this point, which is always good. We didn’t give up any huge returns, but we weren’t killing it in the return game on either of them. We just have to keep getting better. I’m excited about our young players. I think going forward, we’re going to take another step for sure.”
Meanwhile, offensive coordinator Matt Nagy shared a positive reflection on the season.
“There were parts in the middle of the season where we felt like we were at a peak level offensively,” Nagy noted. “Unfortunately, it didn’t last the whole way through the year — and now here we are playing in this game that is important for us to finish strong. It’s our job to do that: to coach strong, [for] the players to play strong — and in the end, win. The last several games didn’t go how we wanted, but we want to finish on a high note.“
The Chiefs have lost five straight games to this point, an unacceptable finish to the year by anyone’s standards at 1 Arrowhead Drive. From here, it will be about what actions the organization can take to ensure these mistakes aren’t repeated in 2026.
