Why Chiefs-Ravens matchup is taking on added importance

Anytime the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs play it's going to have added importance. They have been two of the NFL's best teams over the past few years, are constant Super Bowl contenders and have MVP quarterbacks in Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes. When these two play, regular season or playoffs, it's a big deal. 

But what makes this Sunday's meeting so significant is that both teams are off to shockingly slow starts with matching 1-2 records.

One of these teams might be playing for their season

While it would be really hard to write off one of these two teams after just four weeks, especially given the quarterbacks they have, somebody is going to be walking out of this game with a 1-3 record and putting themselves at the base of a pretty tall mountain when it comes to the AFC Playoff field.

Kansas City is entering Sunday's game already two games behind the Los Angeles Chargers in the AFC West race, and with them playing New York Giants rookie quarterback in Jaxson Dart on Sunday there is a very real chance they will improve to 4-0. If that happens, and the Chiefs lose, they would already be facing a three-game hole in the division. 

That would be tough to overcome, even for Mahomes and head coach Andy Reid,

From a Baltimore perspective, the Ravens had to play an absolutely brutal schedule so far and have to run a gauntlet of the Buffalo Bills, Detroit Lions and now the Chiefs all within the first four weeks of the season. The defense has struggled against the better offenses, and despite Jackson's fantastic play on offense they have not been able to slow anybody down. 

Are the defensive issues a reflection of the tough early schedule? Or a point of real concern for the season? Time will tell, but if they fall to 1-3 it is going to dramatically reduce their margin for error in a tough AFC. 

None of these even gets into the recent statistical probabilities that come with a 1-3 start. Since the start of the 2000 season there have been 183 teams that started a season exactly 1-3 through four games. Of those teams only 24 of them went on to make the playoffs. That is only a 13% success rate (via Pro-Football-Reference Stathead database).

Only one of those teams — the 2001 New England Patriots — went on to win the Super Bowl. 

The odds are simply not going to be in favor of the team that loses this game, no matter what their roster looks like on paper. The mountain gets a little taller, the margin for error gets a lot slimmer. It adds an entirely new level of intrigue to an already big game.