Secret Superstars of the NFL’s conference…

(AP Photo/Emilee Chinn)

One thing we know from that Week 17 matchup is that the Chiefs had absolutely no answer for the combination of Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, and if defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo goes into this game with the same plan he seemed to have against Chase back then — allow your cornerbacks to get demolished one-on-one to the boundary by Chase with no help up top — odds are, Kansas City’s streak of Super Bowls will come to an unpleasant end. Chase caught a season-high 11 passes for a season-high 266 yards, and a season-high three touchdowns.

You get the point. Let “season-high” be your guide.

Super-DB Tyrann Mathieu was out for most of the Chiefs’ thrilling divisional win over the Bills with a concussion, and he’s questionable for the Bengals game. “Questionable” means “all-go” when you get to this point in the season, but if Mathieu isn’t 100%, and/or if Spagnuolo decided to have Mathieu matching Cincinnati’s impressive receivers underneath and over the middle, it will be up to Juan Thornhill, Kansas City’s primary deep safety, to pick up the slack.

Most of the time in Week 17, Thurnhill was either playing underneath from safety or the slot, or deep to the multi-receiver side of the formation, while Chase was the X-Iso guy. That was cute and all, but Chase, despite his rookie status, has become a card-carrying member of the Davante Adams “Double this guy, or you’re gonna die” club.

In that game, per Pro Football Focus, Thornhill played 34 snaps at free safety, and 14 in the slot. And it’s understandable that you’d want a deep safety over the three-receiver side on plays like this… but when the causative factor is cornerback Charvarius Ward getting dunked upon over and over… well, it’s probably time to move No. 22 over to where the big guy is.

(Graphics courtesy of our own Laurie Fitzpatrick in this case).

Because we already know that putting Daniel Sorensen back there to deal with Chase… well, that ain’t it. Never. You give up 69-yard touchdowns when you do that.

“It’s not like they have one weapon, commit two people to it and you’re home free,” Spagnuolo said this week of Cincinnati’s receiver group, which also includes Tyler Boyd, Tee Higgins, and tight end C.J. Uzomah. “All three of those guys, I think we talked about this last time we played Cincinnati, throughout the course of the season, all three of those guys have been the leading receiver for them on a given day. So, they’re all capable of what we call wrecking the game.

“So, we’ve got to pay a lot of attention to all three of them. The quarterback knows where to go with the ball. He’s sharp enough to know that if you’re taking one of his guys away, he’s going to go someplace else. So, we’ll have to play that cat and mouse game, but as dynamic as Ja’Marr Chase is, there’s certainly some other weapons there as well.”

That is the dynamic that no doubt has had Spags burning the midnight oil, but there are times when football is less complicated than we think it is. If the Chiefs smartly double Ja’Marr Chase, they’ve got a shot. If they don’t, a miraculous convergence of events will have to occur for the home team.