beebe

ever left arrowhead before? you'll be lucky to get out of the parking lot by midnight 😄, one of the worst out-flow postgame stadiums in the league. shocking considering the stadium is in the middle of nowhere with easy interstate access.

these are all 6-8 hour round-trip drives just noting. wichita is another option but also 3 hours away from kc. pretty miserable weekend with a loss. likely worth it with a win, but still a pretty exhausting trip for 3 hours of football.

I'd be very surprised if there's many (if any) seats that fall to $150 after fees. I checked all the stadiums for last week's game, KC was the cheapest of the four but also had the least desirable matchup. even the the worst nosebleeds were still above $125 near kickoff. Many re-sale seats you see are pipedream listings from sellers who intend to go but can be bought out for the right price. For example, the lower level section behind the Chiefs, between the 40s, here's the prices currently listed: Box office prices $1196/each (4 total) Re-sell prices $3641, $4758, $2259, $2975, $2351, $3001, $2971, $2015, $1785, $2975, $2380, $1428, $2021, $1249, $1545, $2588, $1779, $2882, $2618, $2540, $2570, $2328, $2328 etc. Maybe a handful of these seats (priced in low 1000s) will sell on re-sale market at current prices. The rest will either be taken down or substantially reduced, likely to the $750-1k range.

just checked chiefs ticketmaster. here's the lowest current prices per ticket (all include taxes/fees): lowers between the 40s: $1200 30-40 yd line: $900 goal line-30 yd line (avg): $775 corners: $600 end zone: $535 club between the 40s: $2000+ 30-40 yd line: $1750 goal line-30 yd line (avg): $1600 corners: $1250 endzone: $1050 uppers you can find seats as low as $330. but these are mostly confined to corners in the upper rows and arrowhead is a huge stadium (4th largest capacity in the nfl) so those are not great seats. for low-row uppers in good locations you're likely spending above $500/seat.

the tickets coming from the chiefs aren't face value. they price them in line with whatever the re-sale market is. there's seats in club level for over $1500, others for over $2000. there's lower levels being priced as high as $1600. there are various upper level corners for $450. "dynamic pricing" or whatever you call it. some stadiums (including buffalo) are now listing their tickets as all-in price, which is a good move. an additional good move would be to show the actual face value of each seat. when you click ticketmaster and see blue seats offered directly from the chiefs, you would assume that's the face value of the ticket. but that isn't the case. that's their jacked-up price to ensure they get the same amount as the re-seller who has seats in the same/similar locations. people think they're getting a deal when in reality they're getting smoked. prices should fall closer to game day.

He is the most penalized player in the entire NFL the last two years. Do the refs miss some? Of course.

the refs have zero incentive - none - to intentionally get calls wrong. they are graded after every game internally, and fans and media grade them publicly. being wrong leads to less opportunity to call playoff games and super bowls. do people actually think the nfl is going to tell clete blakeman and his crew to cheat for the chiefs? for what purpose? so they can cultivate more swiftie viewers in the short term while jeopardizing the long term? (ie scandal, lack of trust, gambling ramifications etc.) this would be literal criminal behavior if such a thing took place. it would be game fixing directed by the league to be carried out by the people charged with maintaining fair play. officiating is incredibly hard. there’s a subset of national tv games every year that have so many 50/50 bang-bang subjective/judgment calls that it’s almost comical. like, the refs are wrong no matter what they call. the broadcasters think A, the rules experts think B, and the fans are going to think whatever benefits their team, goes against the team they hate or whatever helps their bets. most people who opine about the rules don’t even know the rulebook themselves (i have watched 1000+ games and i don’t know all the rules myself.) bitching about refs has gone too far. it’s too frequently the story because slow motion replay, freeze frames and instant reaction social media takes - often by the most conspiratorial morons on earth - makes it the story. once you accept that missed calls are inevitable and random, you will enjoy watching sports more.

among active QBs, josh allen draws the most roughing the passer penalties in the NFL on a per-game basis with 38 in 122 games (0.31 per game). allen drew 11 roughing the passer penalties in the 2020 season. i believe that is a modern NFL record (no other QB has drawn more than 8 in a year in data that goes back the last 15 years.) allen had seven roughing calls last year and five more this year. mahomes has had 31 career roughing the passer penalties, or 0.23 per game, which ranks him ninth among active QBs. but mahomes also throws far more than the league average and has attempted more passes than his peers who entered the league at roughly the same time. for example, mahomes has attempted ~800 more passes than allen since entering the league and has played nine more games (includes playoffs). given that, you'd expect mahomes to have more - not less. if you break it down by dropbacks, it looks like this: allen: 0.93 per 100 (3rd most penalties drawn) mahomes: 0.64 per 100 (20th most) among the 31 roughing the passer penalties for mahomes, eight of them have come in playoff games or super bowls. someone with more time than me can go through the eight plays and determine if they are legit or not - or the timing - or how much they mattered. i don't think the chiefs get preferential treatment from refs. the numbers actually suggest the opposite (not just mahomes, but the chiefs in general.) the common counter argument is that "it's not how many penalties, it's when." i read a recent analysis that suggested the chiefs are not major beneficiaries in one-score games in 2nd halves either. the fans of 31 teams who call the refs biased for the chiefs likely have a bias against the chiefs themselves. they're sick of the chiefs. they actively root against the chiefs. and nobody plays in primetime or on national tv more than the chiefs. "calling out the chiefs" has become an easy way for media members to get attention and claiming the refs don't have bias but are equally bad for all teams is the surest way to be hated and called a clown. no other team in the league has fans that all come together to create frame-by-frame replays, zoomed-in images and super slow motion videos quite like the chiefs. because of this, the chiefs flags draw outsized attention/coverage/reaction. people simply don't care if there's a bad call in a panthers or colts game. interestingly, america defended the chiefs in the 2018 afc championship game when two and possibly three rotten calls went against them to help the patriots win the game. but at that point in time, america loved mahomes and the chiefs and were alleging that the patriots got all the calls and that the nfl was cheating for them. next time you watch a bills game and see a bad call - whether it be the atrocious call against dawkins or the questionable pass interference penalty that benefited coleman in the ravens game - just ask yourself: "what if this was the chiefs?" because those calls, while they got some attention, generated very little media coverage broadly. and the PI flag, whether it was right or wrong, was probably the biggest call of the game in terms of win expectancy.

how many is fans of buffalo expecting any idea? i know a few who are interested

Just peeked at box office sale, tickets are unbelievably high. Prices are what you would expect for Vegas, New York or LA, not Kansas City. Are there 75,000+ people in KC area who can afford $750 uppers and lowers as high as 2k? There are club levels with $2500 face.

i generally agree that the chiefs have been more healthy than unhealthy in the playoffs for the mahomes era but they've taken some brutal lumps of their own. their shot at b2b super bowls was pretty much crushed due to injuries all along the offensive line before the bucs game (bucs DL chased mahomes all over the yard.) last year, they lost all pro left guard joe thuney and their best non chris jones pass rusher charles omenihu to season ending injuries in the playoffs. mahomes has had to leave two different playoff games (didnt finish the game vs browns in 2020, forced to the locker room by andy vs jags in 2022) and his injury was believed to be so limiting before the bengals '22 afc title game that the chiefs opened as 3.5 point home underdogs. mahomes was limited during the super bowls vs bucs and eagles. but yes, they've ran pretty well on injuries as a whole, certainly haven't racked up major cluster injuries at a position outside of the aforementioned OL disaster in 2020.

for all intents and purposes it's a sellout. 99.5% of seats have been sold.

is wild card fatigue starting to settle in and people are saving $ for divisonal round and beyond? just checked the bills ticketmaster site, there's still over 300 seats left direct through the box office, there's close to a couple thousand seats on resale for less than $200, and some are selling for less than $100 (including fees). there's a bunch of lowers still selling for less than $150 and 45-yard line lower level for $245. i'd guess these will be even cheaper overnight/tomorrow. the forecast looks pretty good for WNY in mid january. if you're on the fence, this seems like an overly fair price point for a playoff game.

The rest of the NFC is pretty mid.

Andy Reid, Jim Harbaugh, Sean Payton, Bill Belichick in the same division. That would essentially eliminate the AFC West from the #1 seed for the immediate future.