The Kansas City Chiefs are now heading into Sunday's game against the New York Jets on the back of a two-game losing streak, and Travis Kelce is far from impressed with himself.
After starting off the season with a perfect five-game run of wins, the Chiefs have now lost both of their last two games against the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos. Kelce has failed to provide a huge impact in either game, having failed to score a touchdown since Week Three.
However, there were bigger issues for the Chiefs than simply being able to find the end zone on Sunday, with penalties massively hindering Andy Reid's team. This is something that Kelce has picked up on and has been left furious with himself over.
The Chiefs ended the game on Sunday against the Broncos having been penalised 11 times by the officials. Those penalties totalled up to 105 yards during the game, which was significantly more than the Broncos' 45 yards from six penalties.
"I wish we would have finished it better. Penalties will [hurt] you in this league, and right now we are [hurting] ourselves in that regard. I'm at the forefront. I think it's my third week in a row I've had a f****** procedural penalty that's halted the drive, or we're going backwards instead of going forwards," Kelce said on the latest New Heights podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/embed?uri=spotify%3Aepisode%3A4XxX5FI78i0rVm8I027tJF
"And I've been doing this too long to be hurting my team like that, and I mean it's just inexcusable. And obviously throughout the game there were a lot of them that stopped drives, that put us in tough positions and tough situations, including the last one.
"And I mean I love J-Mo, and J-Mo knows we're rocking with him every single day of the week, and he'll fix it, just like I got to get mine fixed and the rest of the team, they got flagged over the course of the game, and this has to get fixed. So I'm not blaming it all on penalties. We still got to execute in the run game. We had a bunch of chances down there in the red zone at the end to be able to punch it in and just didn't execute."
Kelce was called for a false start on Sunday against the Broncos in the first quarter on a second-and-nine play. He had already been penalised twice this season for an illegal block in Week Six and an illegal shift in Week Seven.
There appears to have been a real lapse in concentration from Kelce over the last three games, with all of his penalties coming since the Bye Week. Although these penalties on their own may not have cost the Chiefs the games against Seattle and Denver, they do not set a great precedent as one of Reid's senior leaders.
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