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Winners and losers from the KC Chiefs’ Week 5 win over the NO Saints
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Winners and losers from the KC Chiefs’ Week 5 win over the NO Saints

The Kansas City Chiefs are back in the win column for another week, as Andy Reid’s team picked up a fifth straight victory on Monday evening.

With a 26-13 victory over the New Orleans Saints, the back-to-back Super Bowl champions enter their bye week with a 5-0 record. Quite a few players performed strongly on the big stage, while some others struggled to remain effective and had some work to do during their time off. Overall, though, it was a good team win for Kansas City against a tough NFC opponent.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the Chiefs’ biggest winners and losers from the fifth week of the regular season.

The huge caveat to including JuJu Smith-Schuster as the winner is taking into account the pass he dropped near the end zone that was intercepted by Khalen Saunders. Despite his good play, it would be unfair not to mention that. However, apart from the fall, Smith-Schuster was nothing short of brilliant. With seven passes on eight targets, the veteran wideout totaled 130 yards and even had a 50-yard catch, which helped put the game away late. Smith-Schuster waited patiently for his time and looked like the 2022 version of himself when he was asked by the Chiefs to answer the call, which is exactly what he did in Week 5.

A week after giving up a sack to Bud Dupree of the Los Angeles Chargers and taking multiple penalties, Jawaan Taylor failed to have a clean game on Monday. The high-priced right tackle had a false start in the first quarter and later saw a holding penalty negate a touchdown for Noah Gray. Taylor remains an effective piece in run blocking and pass protection, so it’s hard to nitpick too much here, but the penalties to have to be cleaned up. Reid was adamant about that before Week 5, and he’ll certainly emphasize that point again.

For the second week in a row, Kareem Hunt led Kansas City’s running back room and looked like someone who honestly deserved the duty. Just two games removed from not playing at all, he had 27 carries and a reception on Monday night. Hunt reached the 100-yard mark for the first time since 2020, and his first Chiefs touchdown since 2018 was a feel-good moment for both the player and the team. Hunt’s average yards per carry of 3.8 won’t blow anyone away, but if he continues to do his steady work, Kansas City won’t miss Isiah Pacheco as much as originally expected.

Obviously, if Hunt dominates the carries in the backfield, that means someone else is getting the short end of the stick. Once again that turned out to be Carson Steele. The undrafted rookie free agent only compiled 12 yards on five carries and while he helped pick up a nice first down on a third-and-1 in the second half, he just wasn’t very effective overall. Add in a fumble that temporarily set back one of the Chiefs’ drives, and it’s easy to see that Steele isn’t doing himself any favors these days.

After a very slow start to the year, linebacker Nick Bolton is building some momentum heading into the bye. This was his second solid effort in a row, and he recorded 11 tackles against the Saints on Monday. Of those plays, seven were for stops within three yards of the line of scrimmage. Bolton played the series quite well in Week 5, shooting into gaps with aggression and consistently making the right plays. It wasn’t a standard Bolton game with one splash play and not much else. It was a legitimately promising outing for the brains of the Chiefs defense.

In the days leading up to the Week 5 game, Mahomes seemed to have a lot of confidence in Smith-Schuster and Justin Watson to step up as veterans at the wide spot. Despite leading the way on Monday with 59 snaps (70% of available snaps), Watson didn’t record a single stat. No catch, no target, not a drop. That’s far from the end of the world — Watson can impact the game in other ways — but for someone coming off a career year, he has Mahomes’ confidence And had more chances, this was a disappointing performance.

Read more: Four lessons from the Chiefs’ 26-13 win over the Saints