Jack Jones vigorously disagrees with Travis Kelce’s assessment that the Chiefs handed the Raiders the game on Christmas.
Jones, the defensive back on the Raiders who scored a pick-six off Patrick Mahomes in the game, was presented with Kelce’s quotes about the matchup in a locker room interaction with a reporter on Friday, and he was in relative disbelief. “He said they gave us that game?” Jones asked. “Tell him to go watch that game. We took that game. Yeah, we on that.” Kelce had likened the Chiefs to Saint Nick.
“We handed that team a win on Christmas. We literally played Santa and gave them a present,” Kelce said on his “New Heights” podcast with his brother Jason earlier this week, as covered by Fox News. “That was embarrassing. Everyone in the building knows how embarrassing that was. We got a short week, so we’re gonna forget about this s–t real quick.” While the Chiefs are leading the AFC West at 9-6, they have not played up to the standard they set as last year’s Super Bowl champions, particularly on offense where Mahomes and his receivers have struggled to get on the same page.
Kelce, who had a helmet-throwing meltdown in the Raiders game, pointed the finger at himself as well as the broader Chiefs team. “It’s not just one guy. It’s not just me playing like dogs–t … Everybody’s in this f–king thing together … We just gotta bring it together, man,” Kelce said on the podcast. “Everybody’s gotta just f–king do their job. Every single play, somebody’s not doing their job. It’s me, one by one, it’s everybody on the team. Whether that’s prep, whether that’s having the confidence and understanding of what the defense is in … how we’re picking up blitzes, how we’re running routes versus certain overages, all of the above.
“We show sparks of what kind of offense we can be. … It just hasn’t been a well-oiled machine like we’ve been in the past, and we just gotta get everybody on the same f–king page.”
