A Swift Path to Success: Do the Kansas City Chiefs Receive Preferential Treatment from NFL Referees?

By Kevin Li and Jason Cheung

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes speaks to a referee following a play. Source: Todd Rosenberg / Getty Images

Introduction

For the past few years, controversy has surrounded the Kansas City Chiefs and the way they are officiated. The Chiefs have been dominating the NFL, winning three of the last six Super Bowls and appearing in all but one in that span, and the relationship between tight end Travis Kelce and superstar artist Taylor Swift has cemented them as the league’s media darlings. With their repeated playoff success, many fans have pointed out what they believe to be favorable treatment of the team from NFL referees. Countless video clips have circulated around social media showing examples of missed holding calls, phantom pass interferences, ridiculous roughing-the-passers, questionable ball placements, and more. In this article, we aim to analyze from a statistical standpoint whether these conspiracies may actually have merit, or if they are simply America’s way of coping with the Chiefs’ greatness.

Methods

To measure “favorable treatment” by the referees, we will compare the amounts of penalties called for and against each NFL team. There are multiple questions we have to answer. Firstly, do the Chiefs overall receive both more beneficial calls and less detrimental calls than other teams? To answer this, we take data from The Football Database (FootballDB.com) on the total number of penalties committed by each team and by their opponent in the 2024 season. We also wanted to see if there is any trend within the last few years related to this, so we used the same database to find the total amount of penalties called against the Chiefs, against the Chiefs’ opponents, and against each team on average over the past eight years (reflecting the time Patrick Mahomes has been in the league). After that, we looked at a few specific penalties, including Offensive Holding, Defensive Pass Interference, and False Starts, once again pulling data from this database. Finally, we wanted to explore the differences specifically in the playoffs, when the importance of fair officiating is heightened as each call can determine when a team’s season ends. We took data from NFL Penalties (NFLPenalties.com) on the amount of penalties committed by and against each team per game in the 2024 playoffs. 

Results

Regular Season Comparison

This graph shows the total number of regular season penalty calls for and against each NFL team in the 2024 season. The Kansas City Chiefs are highlighted in red. There were very few penalties called against the Chiefs in comparison to the rest of the league; specifically, they ranked fourth lowest in penalties called against them. They ranked at the middle of the league in penalties against opponents, at seventeenth most. While they do not qualify as an outlier, this is an interesting position that aligns with some fan complaints. There does not appear to be an excessive amount of penalties called against their opponents, but there are very few penalties called against the Chiefs. Fans have suggested that referees turn a blind eye to the team’s rule-breaking, and this data supports this theory, to a degree. 

Depending on game scripts and schemes, some teams participate in more total plays than other teams. Naturally, teams involved in more plays would have a greater chance of being penalized. This graph shows penalty percentage for and against the Chiefs. This eliminates the total play differences. The results are similar; Kansas City is towards the bottom of the league in penalties called against the team, and around the middle in penalties called against their opponents. 

Some fans claim that the Chiefs have received more favorable treatment from the league in recent years as they have grown in popularity with the rise of superstar Patrick Mahomes, who was drafted in 2017, and the relationship between Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, which began in 2023. This graph shows the total number of regular season calls against the Chiefs, against the Chiefs’ opponents, and against teams on average from 2017 to 2024. All three have downward sloping trend lines. The “Against KC” trendline slope is steeper than the “For KC” and “League Average.” This means that over these eight years, penalties against the Chiefs have decreased at a faster rate than penalties against the average team and against the Chiefs’ opponents. The difference is not statistically significant, but does reflect an idea that the Chiefs have been benefitting increasingly from officiating since Mahomes was drafted. 

Specific Penalties

Fans believe that there are specific things that the Chiefs commonly “get away with.” For example, fans accuse Offensive Tackle Jawaan Taylor of committing more Offensive Holding and False Starts than called by the referees. This is a comparison between how many times the Chiefs were called for specific penalties and how many times the average team was called for those same penalties. The Chiefs had less Defensive Pass Interferences, less False Starts, less Offsides, more Offensive Holdings, less Roughing the Passers, and more Unnecessary Roughness than league average. Most of these differences are quite small, with the largest being in False Starts and Offensive Holdings, two especially controversial penalties. The results slightly favor the Chiefs overall. Even though the Chiefs are called more often than most teams for Offensive Holding, some fans argue that it is still not called enough.

In the playoffs

Some fans argue that in the playoffs, the Chiefs receive more favorable treatment than in the regular season. In the postseason, each play matters more, affecting how many more games the team may play. With the Chiefs’ popularity, it would make sense for the NFL to want them to play more playoff games in order to attract more attention to the playoffs overall. This graph shows penalty percentage for and against each team in the 2024 playoffs. Penalty percentage is used instead of total penalties because each team played a different amount of games. Of 14 teams, the Chiefs ranked fifth in penalties for, putting them at the top, and eighth in penalties against, putting them in the middle. This is a contrasting result to the regular season, in which the opposite results were seen. This suggests that in the playoffs, the referees may have been calling an unfair amount of penalties against the Chiefs opponents, although they are not an outlier in this dataset. 

Conclusion

Overall, it is difficult to say whether or not the Chiefs receive favorable treatment from the referees. While there are certain statistics that show the Chiefs benefitting from officiating, these differences between them and other teams are relatively small and insignificant, and it is unclear what these discrepancies are actually caused by. While it is possible that the Chiefs are given an advantage by the NFL and its referees, they may also simply be better coached in avoiding certain penalties and drawing others. Some of these results are quite interesting, and future in-depth analyses should be conducted. We would like to access data on when specific penalties are called. Many fans think that in crucial moments, such as with little time left on in the red zone, the Chiefs benefit most. Whether or not the NFL is truly rigged for the Kansas City Chiefs and their Swifty fans remains an unanswered question.