KC Keeps Churning

The Kansas City Chiefs won their sixth consecutive game on Sunday at the O.co Coliseum, topping the Oakland Raiders 34-20. Kansas City now moves to 7-5 and stays in the first wild card spot of the AFC playoff picture. Meanwhile, Oakland falls to 5-7 and has all but watched its playoff hopes vanish into the night.

Derek Carr has been brilliant for most of the game, tossing three interceptions that turned the tide of the game. The Chiefs were trailing the Raiders 20-14 in the second half when Carr panicked and threw a hideous interception to linebacker Josh Mauga, who returned the ball to the 2-yard line. From there, Kansas City went great guns and took the game over.

The Chiefs are racing toward January, while the Raiders can’t afford another loss. It wasn’t pretty, but Alex Smith did enough to keep Kansas City in playoff contention with a clean 16-of-22 performance. That made him just the third player in league history to attempt 300-plus throws in a row without a pick, joining Tom Brady (358) and Bernie Kosar (308). Smith’s mistake-free day looked even more impressive against a pass rush that pounded him repeatedly and piled up four sacks. Two lost fumbles marked Kansas City’s first turnovers since Week 6, but a fountain of Oakland mistakes sealed a sixth straight win for Andy Reid’s bunch.

As the Chiefs heated up, Derek Carr melted down. The second-year Raiders quarterback hurt Oakland with a trio of interceptions over the final two quarters. The first came off a sack-pick that saw Josh Mauga snatch the ball out of the air and take it 66 yards to the Oakland 2-yard line. Carr then sawMarcus Peters intercept him and race 58 yards, before Tyvon Branch sunk a final knife in Oakland with his 38-yard pick six. On the plus side, Carr made one of his finest throws of the year on a thread-the-needle touchdown strike toMichael Crabtree, but it wasn’t enough. While the young quarterback became the fifth passer in NFL history to throw for 3,000-plus yards and 20-plus touchdowns in his first two seasons, Carr’s face said it all in a depressing loss.