For years, Missouri’s Kansas City Chiefs have been the NFL team to beat.
With young quarterback Patrick Mahomes leading the charge in 2020, they bested the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LIV and narrowly beat them again four years later. In 2023, they were also Super Bowl champs, defeating the Philadelphia Eagles with a game-winning field goal. Before that, they had not clinched the title since 1970.
But academics at the University of Texas El Paso and institutions across the eastern U.S. have suggested their winning record could have had a helping hand.
In an analysis of more than 13,000 penalty calls spanning from 2015 to 2023, they found that postseason officiating has disproportionately favored the Mahomes–era Kansas City Chiefs.
That’s something they suggest could be tied to financial pressure on the league, noting that the findings show correlation but not proof of any corruption.
“The fact that postseason penalties consistently favored one franchise, while similar dynasties showed no such pattern, points to the powerful role of financial incentives in shaping supposedly neutral decisions,” Dr. Spencer Barnes, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Woody L. Hunt College of Business, said of the new study.
The NFL, the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL Referees Association did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment on the matter.
During the Mahomes-era playoffs, which the researchers said was the NFL’s most commercially valuable period, penalties against opposing defensive players were 23 percent more likely to result in first downs, cover an average of 2.36 yardage and were 28 percent more likely fall into subjective categories such as roughing the passer or pass interference, the study found.
However, the same effects were not seen for the Tom Brady–era New England Patriots and other winning teams, the researchers said.
This, they argued, suggests the phenomenon is unique to the Chiefs, who became good for TV ratings.
“This research not only deepens our understanding of sports governance, but also illustrates a larger societal concern: when financial pressure weighs heavily, impartiality can erode,” Dr. John Hadjimarcou, dean of the Woody L. Hunt College of Business, said.
This year’s Super Bowl, which the Chiefs lost to the Eagles, was the most-watched in history, pulling in nearly 128 million viewers, according to Nielsen data cited by Variety.
Previous years before Mahomes saw ratings drop, with viewers tuning out during civil rights protests, according to Alabama’s Samford University. Although, the league’s ratings were still “by far and away the most attractive property in all of television by a huge margin,” CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said then.
Now in its 106th season, the NFL has grown by about $1 billion a year since 2010 and generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue, according to The New York Times. It’s projected to reach a goal of $25 billion and a recent Sports Business Journal report says they’re just $2 billion short.
This season, the Chiefs have a losing record through five games for just the second time in the Mahomes era, start at 2-3. They had 13 penalties in a game on Monday, losing 31-28 to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Still, they started the same way in 2021 before turning things around to go 12-5, losing in the AFC Championship Game to Cincinnati, NFL.com said.
During regular season play, the Chiefs receive fewer favorable penalty calls than average, the researchers noted, according to StudyFinds.
