Banner Night: When the Chiefs Crashed Foxborough

The NFL opens every season by letting the defending champion throw itself a party. On September 7, 2017, the party was in Foxborough, the banner was for the 28-3 comeback against Atlanta, and the guest list included a Kansas City team that was supposed to stand politely on the visitors' sideline and lose.

Kansas City won 42-27. It was not a fluke, and by the end it was not especially close.

The Setup

Seven months earlier, the Patriots had come back from 25 points down in the Super Bowl and beaten the Falcons in overtime. Tom Brady was 40 and showing no signs of acting like it. Bill Belichick ran a defense that had spent the better part of two decades taking away whatever you did best. Julian Edelman was already gone for the year with a torn ACL from the preseason, but that felt like a footnote. The Patriots had won without people before. New England was laying more than a touchdown at home, and almost nobody blinked at the number.

Kansas City brought Alex Smith, a quarterback with a reputation for never losing a game by himself and rarely winning one by himself either. It brought Tyreek Hill, who was fast in a way that made defensive coordinators lose sleep. And it brought a rookie running back out of Toledo, a third-round pick named Kareem Hunt, making his NFL debut.

Somewhere on the Kansas City sideline stood the backup quarterback, another rookie named Patrick Mahomes. File that away.

Hunt Fumbles, Then Doesn't Stop

Hunt wasn't even supposed to be the guy. He got the job because Spencer Ware went down in the preseason. Then his first carry as a pro ended with the ball on the ground. In that building, on that night, that is usually how a rookie's evening goes sideways for good.

Instead he finished with 246 yards from scrimmage, the most by any player in an NFL debut since the merger, and three touchdowns. He ran through arm tackles, caught passes out of the backfield and kept turning short gains into long ones. By the fourth quarter, the Patriots were mostly looking at the back of his jersey.

Hill Gets Behind Everybody

New England led 17-14 at halftime, and for a while the script looked like it would hold. It didn't. Smith spent the night finding people behind the secondary. Hill got loose for a 75-yard touchdown. Hunt turned a short catch into a 78-yard score. The Patriots punched back, and then the fourth quarter belonged to Kansas City.

Smith finished with four touchdown passes and no interceptions, the kind of line nobody associated with him and nobody expected against Belichick. Brady completed less than half of his throws. The Patriots' defense gave up more than 500 yards. For one night in Foxborough, the visitors looked like the team that had been there before.

It cost them, too. Eric Berry, the heart of the Kansas City defense, tore his Achilles that night and was done for the season.

What It Meant, and What It Didn't

It would be tidy to call it the night the torch got passed. It wasn't, not yet. New England shook it off, went 13-3 and made it back to the Super Bowl. Kansas City started 5-0, then wobbled, then blew a 21-3 halftime lead at home to Tennessee in the wild-card round and went home early.

But it was a preview. That winter, the Chiefs traded Smith to Washington and gave the job to the kid from the sideline. Mahomes threw 50 touchdowns in his first full season as a starter. In January 2019, Kansas City and New England met again with a Super Bowl trip on the line, and the Patriots needed overtime to survive it. After that, the AFC ran through Kansas City for a long time.

Hunt led the league in rushing as a rookie. Hill became one of the most feared receivers in football. And Foxborough learned something it rarely had to learn in those years.

The banner goes up before kickoff. The other team doesn't have to watch.