Mitch Albom: If you read NFL tea leaves, you could have seen this Lions loss coming

There are many NFL games that surprise you. This wasn’t one of them.

This showdown between the Detroit Lions and the Chiefs, on a warm humid Sunday night before a raucous Arrowhead Stadium crowd, went pretty much the way anyone who didn’t have a dog in the hunt would have figured.

The Chiefs, coming in, were a great team with a bad record. At 2-3, they needed this game to right their ship. And you don’t have all those Super Bowl trophies on your mantel and not know how to rise to the moment.

The Lions, coming in, were a great team with a depleted secondary. Depleted? There are phone booths that could fit more healthy bodies. Detroit was missing its top five cornerbacks, and a few safeties were gimpy. I don’t want to say they were working in a lot of new guys. But I think I saw some of them wearing name tags.

Which meant if the Lions were to win this game, they would have to score almost every time they had the ball – touchdowns, not field goals – while they chewed the clock, and prayed for a couple of stops on Patrick Mahomes and the often-unstoppable K.C. offense.

Well. They tried.

But in the end, the Chiefs did exactly what they needed to do, and the Lions did not. Near-perfection was required; it was not achieved. A drop here. A penalty there. And if you thought the Lions, after four wins in five games, were some kind of Superman, then you just saw their kryptonite.

Injuries – which every team has.

And a unique offense that is built to score early, but not to come back late.

“You gotta play your best,” Dan Campbell told WXYT-FM (97.1) after the 30-17 defeat, “when you play a team like that.”

That was not their best.

No surprise.

'We're so freaking close!'

Now if you watched this game on TV, you saw Campbell almost burst a blood vessel during a halftime interview by saying “We're so freaking close! We’re three plays away from turning this thing on its head!”

He was right. And when it was over, they were about five plays away. And that’s the story in the NFL. Almost every game can be broken down to four or five key plays that determine the outcome. Here were the Lions tide-turners:

• A first quarter touchdown that was called back when Jared Goff failed to set up properly on an otherwise beautiful trick play where he caught a pass from David Montgomery and reached the end zone. Detroit, after a brilliant drive that chewed nearly 10 minutes off the clock, settled for a field goal.

• On the ensuing drive, a fourth-and-3 for the Chiefs that the Lions couldn’t stop, resulting in a 6-yard touchdown pass from Patrick Mahomes to Xavier Worthy.

• A dropped pass by Amon-Ra St. Brown on a fourth down in the second quarter that would have kept a drive alive and likely kept KC from getting the ball back before halftime. Instead, the Lions got no points, and the Chiefs scored a touchdown with 37 seconds left.

• An avoidable roughing-the-passer penalty on Aidan Hutchinson in the fourth quarter that pushed the ball to midfield, and energized a K.C. touchdown drive that would be the nail in the coffin.

“That’s a good football team,” Mahomes told NBC after the game. “(We) showed what we can do.”

And what, on this night, the Lions could not.

No surprise.

Lions feel Mahomes effect

Once Detroit fell behind by 10, the game felt as if things were running uphill. It didn’t help that the Chiefs never committed a turnover and somehow didn’t get a single penalty called on them.

That may feel strange. Even unfair. But remember, these Chiefs have been to four of the last five Super Bowls, and won three of them. They were not going to fall to 2-4 without putting up their hardest, most focused effort.

And Mahomes is exactly the kind of quarterback to exploit a weakened secondary. He scrambles and eludes long enough for even veteran defenders to break down. Then he takes advantage, either by running or locating a receiver in a gap. The Lions needed their pass rushers to control this game, and while they were officially credited with three sacks, they never got to Mahomes when it really mattered. The Chiefs tagged them for 112 yards rushing (including 32 from Mahomes) and 257 yards passing.

The Lions offense, meanwhile, is more like a futuristic machine. When it hums, it truly hums. But if it falls behind and has to swallow up big gulps of pass-only offense, it’s not as good. This is a running game/play action offense when it’s at its best, and it was much of Sunday night.

But down the fourth-quarter stretch, you felt it strained. Detroit’s last two drives went for four yards and nine yards. Campbell later told a media interviewer that it felt as if they were watching K.C. take a knee for 10 minutes.

“When we do those long drives if we don’t finish those with touchdowns, were kind of putting ourselves behind the eight ball,” Goff told the media after the loss. “I think they played just a little bit better.”

A little bit is all it takes when two teams are this close.

Does it ruin everything? Of course not. Does it send a concerning message? Sure it does. The Lions have Tampa Bay next Monday night at home, and the Bucs are 5-1, a conference rival, and a regular thorn in Detroit’s side. Baker Mayfield is likely already studying how Mahomes exploited the Lions defensive backfield.

But this is how the journey goes in the NFL. You start with a solid boat, you take hits, you develop holes, you patch, you bail, you watch your opponents navigate the same angry waters, and you try and whip your vessel together come the postseason.

We are a long way from that. But some storylines are already etched in the oars. The Chiefs still have championship DNA. The Lions are terrific, but they can’t win one-handed. And losses in October instruct as much as they sting.

Let’s see what the Lions learn from this. Does the defeat hurt? Yes. Is it surprising? No. But remember, should these two teams meet again this season, that can only mean one good thing. One very good thing.

Mitch Albom will sign copies of his new novel “Twice” this Friday, Oct. 17, at 6:30 pm, Book A Million in Beverly Hills, and this Saturday, Oct. 18, at 930 a.m., Barnes and Noble in Ann Arbor, 3235 Washtenaw Ave.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Albom: If you read NFL tea leaves, you could have seen this one coming