After a wild, upset-filled Sunday slate, we’re set to wrap up Week 5 of the 2024 NFL season with the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs playing host to the New Orleans Saints.
Kansas City is 4-0, but has scored fewer points in each successive game this season and is now without both Isiah Pacheco and Rashee Rice. The defense remains one of the best in the league, though, and has held some good offenses in check.
The Saints began their own season with a pair of blowout wins while totaling 91 points, but have slumped the past two weeks and dropped two in a row to even their record at .500. They have an opportunity here to match the Falcons and Buccaneers with a 3-2 record atop the NFC South.
Can the Chiefs remain unbeaten even with a depleted offense, or will the Saints pull off another shocker on the road? We’ll find out soon enough. Before we break down the matchup, here’s a look at how you can watch the game.
Where to watch
Date: Monday, Oct. 7 | Time: 8:15 p.m. ET
Location: GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City, Missouri)
Channel: ESPN | Stream: fubo (try for free)
Follow: CBS Sports App
Odds: Chiefs -5.5; O/U 43 (via SportsLine consensus odds)
When the Saints have the ball
New Orleans in the first two games of the season absolutely lit up the Panthers and Cowboys defenses. The Saints piled up 811 yards and 91 points in those two games, scoring touchdowns on 11 of 21 drives and coming away with points on 16 of them. In the two games since, the Saints have just 36 points and 585 yards, with just four touchdowns on 19 drives and scores on seven of them.
Which version of this offense should we expect on Monday night? Given what we have seen from the Carolina and Dallas point-prevention units since those respective games, it sure seems like the Saints are closer to the team they have been in Weeks 3 and 4 than the one they were in Weeks 1 and 2. That’s especially the case with Alvin Kamara banged up and Taysom Hill dealing with fractured ribs.
Kamara is being overloaded with volume through four weeks, with 97 touches so far. He demolished Carolina (15 carries for 83 yards) and Dallas (20 for 115) on the ground, but has been much less efficient against Philadelphia (26 for 87) and Atlanta (19 for 77). Kansas City is allowing just 3.8 yards per carry to date, the fourth-best mark in the NFL. Its defensive line is playing at an extremely high level and the second-level defenders are absolutely flying around. If Kamara can’t get going in the run game, the under-center play-action and motion-based passing attack we saw in the first couple weeks of the year won’t be quite as effective; and if Derek Carr has to go straight dropback passing against a Steve Spagnuolo defense, the Saints are pretty unlikely to find success.
Kansas City has gotten excellent play not just out of Trent McDuffie, but also Chamarri Conner, Jaylen Watson and safeties Justin Reid and Bryan Cook. Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed are capable of beating even the best defensive backs, but this is going to be a tough task for them.
When the Chiefs have the ball
As we wrote last week, losing Rashee Rice means the Chiefs have to make dramatic changes to their offense:
Through the first three games of the season, Rice led the Chiefs in catches (24), targets (29), receiving yards (288) and receiving touchdowns (2). He was drawing a target on 33.7% of Chiefs pass attempts — the second-largest share in the NFL, via Tru Media. His targets per route run rate of 34.1%, meanwhile, ranked first among the 78 players who had run at least 75 routes through Week 3.
In Week 4, that meant shifting a significant portion of the passing game back to Travis Kelce, who was clearly having his workload managed through the first three games. Kelce had just eight catches for 69 scoreless yards on 12 targets in Weeks 1 through 3 before going off for seven catches and 89 yards on nine targets against the Chargers. He’d been targeted on just 13.6% of his routes through three weeks, Kelce inhaled targets at a 21.9% clip in Week 4 — much more in line with the rate we’ve seen him earn targets throughout his career.
The issue with building the plan around Kelce at this point is that he’s 35 years old, and that he might break down carrying this kind of burden throughout the regular season. The issue with doing so in this specific game is that the strength of New Orleans’ defense is over the middle, where linebackers Demario Davis and Pete Werner (though out for Week 5), as well as safety Tyrann Mathieu, do their work. If that crew can corral Kelce and force Kansas City to funnel its passing game elsewhere, things could get difficult for the Chiefs.
In Rice’s absence, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Justin Watson will pick up more snaps. But Smith-Schuster is not the same player he was even two years ago in Kansas City, and Watson is a pure deep threat who has never really earned any volume. This is a situation where the Chiefs desperately need first-round pick Xavier Worthy to step up and become a much bigger part of the offense than he has been through the first four weeks of the year. His speed is his best asset; but he was a strong route-runner and target earner at Texas. K.C. needs that version of Worthy to show up in the pros.
If the Saints can get pressure (which they have done at the league’s seventh-highest rate so far this season, via Tru Media) and speed up Mahomes’ process and force him to check the ball down and matriculate downfield, that’s all the more beneficial for them. The Chiefs made a lot of noise this offseason about opening up the offense and attacking downfield again, but with Marquise Brown out for the year and now Rice sidelined as well, it’s looking like that’s not going to happen.
If Pacheco were healthy and the Chiefs could just run it down teams’ throats, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Whether Kareem Hunt, who is fresh off the street after being unsigned two weeks ago and was mediocre the last two years in Cleveland, can replicate that kind of downhill success, it will go a long way toward giving the Chiefs a runway to get the ball moving.
Prediction
This seems like a game where both teams struggle to move the ball all that well, due to the strength of the defenses relative to the offenses. In that type of game, rolling with Mahomes and Andy Reid in their home stadium is the only logical choice. Pick: Chiefs 20, Saints 13
