Chiefs Can No Longer Be Ignored in the Crowded AFC Playoff Picture

You’ve seen the commercial roughly 200 times now during NFL Sundays. An older man slowly walks up to the top of a diving platform as his iPhone provides the background music for the ascent. Then he plunges, and there’s barely a ripple below after the unexpected moment of gracefulness.

That’s the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2016 season.

They don’t field many marquee household names, especially on offense with running back Jamaal Charles likely out for the season and wide receiver Jeremy Maclin injured. Tight end Travis Kelce is reaching that level, though, and he finished with 140 receiving yards on eight catches during Sunday’s 29-28 win over the Atlanta Falcons.

They don’t light a fuse offensively with plenty of field-stretching deep heaves. Instead their West Coast offense approach is mostly methodical and meandering.

And defensively the classic football-ism of bending without breaking was made for the Chiefs. They’ll give up their share of chunk yardage, and they came into Week 13 averaging 381.9 yards allowed per game (28th).

So no, they won’t earn much extra credit for flare and fireworks. They don’t want any either. They want wins, and keep getting them when the degree of difficulty each week is at its highest against some of the NFL’s toughest opponents.

In Week 12 the Chiefs squeaked out a critical overtime division win against the Denver Broncos, sliding into a much more favorable position in the battledome AFC West. Then the encore performance came Sunday against the Falcons.

The margin for error couldn’t have been thinner, with the Chiefs winning by a single point. The separation in such games can often come from one key play, or one difference-making player.

For the Chiefs, that player was safety Eric Berry. And the play was his interception return on the Falcons’ fourth-quarter two-point conversation attempt.

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Berry has high-level instincts and awareness for space. That’s not breaking news to anyone who’s watched the four-time Pro Bowler since he entered the league as a first-round pick in 2010. But his latest game-sealing trick was different.

The Falcons had just taken a late fourth-quarter lead and were trying to make it a three-point game with only 4:32 remaining. Berry sat in zone coverage and then dug in …

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