The division beckons

May 13, 2008, 2:10:43 AM by Jonathan Rand - FAQ

Most pre-season pickers were proved right last year after they conceded the AFC West championship to the Chargers. Not only did they breeze to the title, despite a shaky start; the Chargers were the division’s only team to have a winning record.

The Chiefs’ chances to rebound from 4-12 depend partly upon whether they can rediscover their winning ways sooner than the Broncos and Raiders can. Playing in a weak division can be advantageous, providing you’re not one of the teams keeping it weak.

It’s still startling to consider how hard the AFC West fell a year ago. Who could have guessed that the Raiders, Chiefs and Broncos all would own top-12 spots in the 2008 draft?

Since the NFL realigned into eight four-team divisions in 2002, the AFC West had never included more than two losing teams before last season. The 2002 season marked the third time in six years the division produced the AFC champion. Just two years ago, the AFC West had three winning teams, with the Chargers boasting the NFL’s best record and the Chiefs grabbing a wild-card playoff spot.

But fortunes can shift quickly in the NFL and in 2007 the Chiefs and Raiders went 4-12 with the Broncos 7-9. Consequently, the AFC West is ranked as the NFL’s second-weakest division by a panel of ESPN.com staffers.

They ranked each team for 2008 from first to 32nd, then ranked each division according to the strength of its average team. The NFC East ranked first, with its average team ranked ninth.

The AFC West and NFC West had average rankings of 20th, with the AFC West slightly ahead by percentage points. Those divisions tied for last year’s fewest total victories, 26.

How did the AFC West, traditionally among the strongest and best-balanced divisions, come upon hard times? The Chiefs got old. The Broncos lost 62 starts on offense to injuries and saw their run defense collapse.

The Raiders kept spinning their wheels with their fifth head coach in seven years. And the Chargers, 11-5, were not as dominant in the regular season as they had been the year before, though they advanced farther in the 2007 playoffs.

Though teams play two fewer division games than they played before realignment, a division title is more crucial than ever to a team’s playoffs chances. With only two wild-card playoff spots in each conference, the penalty for not finishing first can be severe.

Teams still must strengthen themselves with division matchups in mind. The Jaguars, realizing that their chances to dethrone the Colts in the AFC South depend upon getting pressure on quarterback Peyton Manning twice a year, were determined to draft a blue-chip pass rusher. So they traded four picks to move up to the eighth spot and pick Derrick Harvey from Florida.

AFC West games will have a lot to say about how the Chiefs start and finish this year. Despite facing a bear of an opener, in New England, they have September home games against the Raiders and Broncos, sandwiched around a trip to Atlanta. If the Chiefs can become the division’s most-improved team, there’s no reason they can’t enjoy a fast start.

In a three-week stretch starting November 30, they play at Oakland and Denver before coming home to play the Chargers. The Chiefs’ other division game comes November 9 at San Diego.

The shaky state of the AFC West offers the Chiefs a big shot for upward mobility – as long as they’ve improved enough to be the ones stepping up, and are not the ones getting stepped over.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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A former sportswriter and columnist in Kansas City and Miami, Rand has covered the NFL for three decades and seen 23 Super Bowl games. His column appears twice weekly in-season.