Chiefs vs. Jaguars prediction: Has Kansas City fixed its offense ahead of crucial ‘MNF’ showdown?

In the final game of Week 5 of the NFL season, the Jacksonville Jaguars host the Kansas City Chiefs on “Monday Night Football.”

Jacksonville enters this game at 3-1, having won back-to-back games after a rather embarrassing come-from-ahead loss against the Bengals in Week 2. The Jags just can’t stop forcing turnovers defensively, and it’s helped them stack early-season wins in the first few games of the Liam Coen era.

Kansas City enters at 2-2 after winning back-to-back games following a rough start to the season. The Chiefs looked as good as they have all year in dismantling the Baltimore Ravens last week, but they also looked pretty ordinary in those first three games, so there are questions about which version of the team is the “real” one.

Will the Chiefs get over .500 for the first time this season, or will the Jaguars knock them down another peg? We’ll find out soon enough. But before we break down the matchup, here’s a look at how you can watch the game.

• Date: Monday, Oct. 6 | Time: 8:15 p.m. ET
• Location: EverBank Stadium (Jacksonville)
• TV: ESPN | Stream: Fubo (try for free) 
• Follow: CBS Sports App
• Odds: Chiefs -3.5; O/U 45.5 (via DraftKings Sportsbook)

Bet NFL Week 5 games and NFL odds at DraftKings, where new users get $200 in bonus bets with a winning $5 wager. Click here to get started.

When the Chiefs have the ball

Kansas City’s offense finally got on track in a big way last week against the Ravens, going off for a season-high 382 yards and 37 points. The Chiefs had totaled just 60 points through the first three games of the season, so they nearly doubled their per-game output against Baltimore. 

Second-year wide receiver Xavier Worthy’s return from injury was integral to their success. Worthy made several big plays of his own as he led the team in both rushing and receiving yards, and he played a key role in stretching the field so that players like Travis Kelce and JuJu Smith-Schuster could find holes in the underneath zones of the Ravens defense. 

The Chiefs face a more challenging test in Jacksonville’s defense than they did against Baltimore. The Jaguars have been a turnover-forcing machine so far this season, accumulating an incredible 13 takeaways across their first four games. They have stifled opposing rushing attacks along the way (3.9 yards per carry); their pass rush, led by Josh Hines-Allen and Travon Walker, has been excellent; and the secondary (especially free-agent acquisition Jourdan Lewis) is plastering things on the back end.

A big question here is whether Walker will be healthy enough to play on Monday night. The Jaguars listed him as questionable despite the fact he had wrist surgery last week. He returned to practice with a cast on his wrist and would likely play with a club, if available. Head coach Liam Coen said the team will take the decision down to the wire. If he’s out, that’s obviously a significant blow to Jacksonville up front, and it would help the Chiefs tremendously in their efforts to protect Patrick Mahomes. 

Whether Walker is active or not, it seems unlikely that Kansas City will get much going on the ground. The Jaguars have been excellent against the run, while Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt have been running in mud for most of the season. (They have combined for ONE run of 12 yards or more so far this year.) The Chiefs have expressed an interest in getting rookie Brashard Smith more involved in the proceedings to provide an element of explosiveness, but the process of bringing him along has been fairly slow. 

It will therefore fall — just as it has for most of this season already — to Mahomes and Co. to find cracks in a pass defense that has shown little of them to date. The Chiefs figure to ramp up Worthy’s workload even more after he played around 61% of the snaps last week, and his ability to threaten the defense both vertically and in catch-and-run situations will again be the key to the passing attack. The Chiefs built their early-season passing game around Worthy’s skill set and the way it opens things up for the other members of the pass-catching corps, and we should expect that to continue on Monday night. 

The Jaguars don’t have anyone as fast as Worthy in their secondary, but they also don’t ask their defensive backs to play man-to-man that often anyway. They play zone at one of the highest rates in the NFL (nearly 82%, per Tru Media), and figure to employ a similar tactic here as they try to force Mahomes to matriculate the ball downfield with short completions by taking away the deep stuff. But the Chiefs, more than almost any other team, are used to seeing that tactic, and they’re experienced in trying to combat it.

When the Jaguars have the ball

Much of Jacksonville’s offensive success this season has come on the ground. Liam Coen, who was the architect of one of the league’s best run games last year in Tampa Bay, has brought that success with him to his first head-coaching gig. 

The Jaguars have been fairly efficient in the run game (11th in rushing success rate, per Tru Media), with a key being their ability to avoid negative runs (fifth in negative run rate on running back carries) while consistently gaining medium-chunk gains (ninth in the rate of runs that gain five or more yards). They haven’t hit on that many explosives, but they ones they have hit have gone for huge gains, mostly by Travis Etienne, who has rushes of 30, 48 and 71 yards so far this season.

All of that works in Jacksonville’s favor against Kansas City, which ranks 25th in opponent’s rushing success rate so far this season. Opposing teams are averaging the sixth-most yards before contact per rush against the Chiefs, as well as the ninth-most yards after contact per rush. The Chiefs have generally contained explosive plays (only four rushes of 12 or more yards), but the bend-don’t-break style has been vulnerable to those five-yards-a-pop type of runs that have been Jacksonville’s bread and butter to date (opponents have clipped those off at the second-highest rate in the league, per Tru Media). 

The Jaguars’ passing game hasn’t been quite as successful. Trevor Lawrence has completed only 58.3% of his passes at an average of 5.9 yards per attempt. He’s been inaccurate at a high rate and, when he’s thrown accurately, his receivers have been plagued by drops or issues like cutting off their routes when they should just continue running. 

The connection with Brian Thomas Jr. has been offline all season, as BTJ has caught just 12 of 32 passes thrown his way for 164 scoreless yards. Thomas has been playing with a wrist injury, but he’s also been one of the big culprits when it comes to the drops and the not completing routes. Travis Hunter hasn’t been quite as involved as expected early on, as he’s generally been playing around 55% of the offensive snaps and almost all of his targets have come within a few yards of the line of scrimmage. The Jags have yet to fully unlock his potential as a playmaker.

Lawrence will likely deal with a heavy dose of blitzing for one of the first times this season. He’s been blitzed at one of the lowest rates (20.7%) in the NFL, per Tru Media, but the Chiefs have blitzed at one of the highest (31.9%). Those Kansas City blitzes were remarkably successful last week against the Ravens, and if they can similarly get to Lawrence — who ranks 26th in the league in EPA per dropback against the blitz across the last two seasons — then it will be a difficult evening at the office for the Jaguars’ passing game. 

One area where he could make some hay, though, is as a runner. The Chiefs have gotten a pretty decent amount of pressure this year, but because they’ve had to use extra rushers in order to do it, they have been vulnerable to scrambles at a higher rate than some other defenses.

Prediction

The Jaguars come into this game with a better record than the Chiefs, but they’ve also toed a very tough line to get wins these last two weeks. They could easily have lost both games despite forcing a combined seven turnovers. Can they continue taking the ball way at a high enough rate that some of their relative offensive struggles get masked? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Kansas City has some matchup advantages here, so we’re rolling with the Chiefs to get the win on the road.

Pick: Chiefs 27, Jaguars 17