Why the coin toss was a game-changer in Kansas City Chiefs’ win vs. Las Vegas Raiders

The Kansas City Chiefs play the Buffalo Bills this weekend, meaning there’s likely to be a lot of talk about the Chiefs benefiting from winning the overtime coin-toss in last year’s 42-36 playoff victory over the Bills.

Did you know, though, that winning the opening toss was also a significant part of KC’s 30-29 win over the Las Vegas Raiders on Monday night?

Let’s explain, with help from Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Toub.

Start with this: The Raiders lost the toss before Monday’s game, with KC continuing its tradition of deferring to the second half.

Toub told reporters Thursday, though, that the team doesn’t do that to get the ball after halftime. Instead, it does that so Las Vegas must choose to receive, allowing the Chiefs to select the direction they’d like to kick the football.

KC chose to kick against the wind for a strategic reason: that meant, if there was a field-goal try at the end of the first half, the wind would be at kicker Matthew Wright’s back.

That pre-game planning suddenly became a big deal in the second quarter, when the Chiefs advanced the ball to the Las Vegas 41-yard line with 3 seconds left while trailing 20-7.

Toub said he told coach Andy Reid before the game that, in a normal situation, he’d trust Wright’s range to somewhere around 52 yards. At the end of a half, though, he might push that to 55 or 56.

“It ended up being 59,” Toub said of Monday’s attempt, “so it was that questionable area.”

Reid decided to send out Wright to try the field goal, but then had some second thoughts once quarterback Patrick Mahomes offered on the sideline that he could throw a Hail Mary from that spot. So Reid called a timeout to take extra time to think about his decision.

“They asked me,” Toub said. “I said, ‘He can make this.’”

The final tiebreaker in Toub’s mind? A wind out of the southwest — behind Wright — would potentially give him the extra boost he might need.

It was a small detail that ended up meaningful; Wright’s kick just cleared the crossbar and went through, a 59-yarder that set a new Chiefs mark for longest field goal.

“It wasn’t a high kick. It was a drive kick,” Toub said. “And he put it down the middle.”

Once he entered the locker room at halftime, Toub could sense those three points helped change the game’s momentum. The Chiefs were only down 20-10, and now they were getting the ball to start the third quarter.

“We’re all talking, ‘Hey, we get the ball in the second half on offense. Let’s go down and score, three-point game,” Toub said. “As bad as that was in the first half, it’s only a three-point game when we go down and score, and that’s what we did.”

The end of the first half, then, played a substantial part in the game’s outcome.

Highlighted by a kick, Toub said, that the Chiefs never would’ve attempted ... if they hadn’t won the opening coin toss.

“It barely got in there, but he made it,” Toub said. “It’s unbelievable that he’s got the record. It’s pretty cool.”