The Kansas City Chiefs suffered their first loss of the season Sunday night in Seattle, and it wasn't close.
The 20-3 final score told the story of a night when the Chiefs struggled in all three phases against a Seahawks team that reminded the country exactly why they held the Lombardi Trophy eight months ago.
Seattle came in at 3-3 and struggled on offense, but their play felt much more dominant and urgent than Kansas City's. The Chiefs were outplayed from start to finish, and the winners column is notably short this week.
Here is the full breakdown.
Winners
Nohl Williams, Cornerback
If there was one moment Sunday night when it felt like the Chiefs might have something going, it came with seconds left in the first half. Seattle led 10-0 and lined up on a second-and-goal from the three, with the ball set to return to them to open the third quarter. A 17-0 halftime deficit would almost certainly have been insurmountable.
Instead, Sam Darnold targeted Rashid Shaheed, and Nohl Williams jumped the route, picked it off, and took it 65 yards the other way. His only mistake was not finding the end zone, which loomed large when Butker missed the ensuing field goal as time expired.
It was Williams's first career interception, notable for a corner known as a ball-hawk coming out of California. He finished the night as the Chiefs’ best defender by a wide margin, recording double-digit tackles, including a tackle for loss, and allowing just two catches for 22 yards on three targets, according to PFF’s preliminary grades. In a game short on positives, Williams stood out.
Noah Gray, Tight End
With tight end Travis Kelce dropping two passes and Patrick Mahomes missing him badly on the opening drive, his backup led the Chiefs in receiving. Noah Gray caught all three of his targets for 44 yards, including a 19-yard reception, continuing what has quietly become a bounce-back season for the six-year veteran.
He is now just nine catches and 20 yards away from surpassing his 2025 season totals, and he has caught 12 of his 14 targets this year, making him one of Mahomes’ most reliable options in a season where reliability has been hard to come by at receiver. On a night with little to celebrate, Gray’s consistency was a welcome constant.
George Karlaftis, Defensive End
The Chiefs generated just nine pressures on Darnold all evening, and Karlaftis accounted for five of them. That he was the lone bright spot along the defensive line says more about how poor the rest of the group was than it does about how good he was, though he was good.
He hit Darnold twice, batted down a pass, and recorded a tackle for loss, becoming the only Chiefs pass rusher to register a quarterback hit all night. Former All-Pro Chris Jones had zero pressures on 24 pass-rush snaps, according to PFF’s preliminary grades.
The other four pressures belonged to rookie R Mason Thomas, leaving a goose egg for the rest of the group. Karlaftis has been this defense's more consistent performer all season, and Sunday was no exception, even if the unit around him was subpar.
Losers
Kenneth Walker, Running Back
The matchup was billed as strength-on-strength, and Seattle won it in a landslide. Kenneth Walker, who had rushed for 665 yards in his first five games and topped 100 yards in four of them, was held to 36 yards on 14 carries, both season lows by a wide margin.
He averaged just 2.6 yards per carry and forced only one missed tackle, compared to nearly double digits in every previous game this season. The Seahawks bottled him up all night, and without the run game generating momentum, the play-action attack never materialized. Mahomes finished with just 165 passing yards, his lowest output of the season.
To make the optics worse, Seahawks running back Emanuel Wilson ran for 100 yards and a touchdown on the other side of the ball, flipping the entire pre-game narrative on its head. The Chiefs will learn from this, but it was a humbling night for the NFL’s No. 1 offense.
Harrison Butker, Kicker
The kicking situation has moved from a concern to legitimate alarm territory. Harrison Butker now sits at just 69 percent on field goals this season after missing two more Sunday night. The first was a 45-yarder, the shortest miss of his season, that went wide right. The second was a 58-yarder at the end of the first half that he hit straight down the middle but left short of the uprights.
The latter is the more troubling miss because it raises questions about leg strength, not just accuracy. The Chiefs never reached the red zone all night, so two made kicks likely wouldn't have changed the outcome, but 13-9 midway through the fourth quarter rather than 13-3 with two missed kicks makes the game look entirely different.
Dave Toub and the Chiefs need to determine quickly whether this is a physical issue, a mental one, or both. For a three-time Super Bowl champion and one of the most decorated kickers in NFL history, the decline has been sudden and significant.
L’Jarius Sneed, Cornerback
It is hard to single out one defender on a night when Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught nine passes for 150 yards, and the Chiefs allowed 11-of-16 third-down conversions, many on third-and-medium or longer. But cornerback L’Jarius Sneed stood out for the wrong reasons, and Spagnuolo clearly noticed.
Sneed allowed all five of his targets to be caught for 83 yards in just 14 defensive snaps before being benched for Chris Roland-Wallace in the second half, when the defense performed considerably better. Smith-Njigba piled up 129 yards in the first half, with Sneed on the field for much of it.
Sneed surrendered four first downs, three of them to Smith-Njigba and one to Cooper Kupp. The fact that Darnold was actively targeting whoever Sneed was covering in a game that was never particularly close suggests the league has begun to view him as a liability in coverage, and that Roland-Wallace may need to be the answer moving forward.
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