As bad as it sometimes looked for the Kansas City Chiefs’ defense during their Week 1 victory against the Cleveland Browns, they had a pretty good excuse for not playing at their best.
Safety Tyrann Mathieu and defensive end Frank Clark were game-day inactives, which caught some observers off guard. Mathieu had been on the team’s Reserve/COVID list since September 1 but had been activated to play on Saturday. While Clark had been a limited participant in practice all week and was questionable for the game with a hamstring injury, he’d been dealing with it for so long that it was easy to figure he’d be able to make it through.