Are We Back to a World of Chiefs vs Bills in the AFC Championship Game Again?

Rich has heard it all season for caping for the Rams. The last time he got a torrent like that, he said, was when he predicted people would miss the Chiefs in the playoffs. A lot of people pushed back. There was plenty of Chiefs fatigue.

Well, look who's back. "It's Kansas City Chiefs," Rich said. "They are back and they are stout."

The reason, for the first time in forever, is a running game. Kenneth Walker III came off the bye on Sunday with 19 carries for 128 yards and two touchdowns. Through five games with Kansas City, he leads the NFL with 665 rushing yards. Has the acquisition worked out? "It's a rhetorical question," Rich said, "but I can give you some answers here."

The answers were absurd. Walker is 335 yards shy of giving Patrick Mahomes his first 1,000-yard rusher since Kareem Hunt's rookie season, and it's only week seven. His 665 yards are the most in a player's first five games with a team in NFL history, passing the 645 Eric Dickerson put up as a Rams rookie in 1983. He's the second player in the Super Bowl era with eight or more touchdowns in his first five games with a team, and the first since Dickerson. He's the first player with four multi-touchdown games over the first five games of a season since Calvin Johnson in 2011. And he's the first Chief with multiple games of 100 rushing yards and two rushing touchdowns in a season since Larry Johnson in 2006.

"Did we have Eric Dickerson, Calvin Johnson, and Larry Johnson all rolled into one?" Rich asked. "Did we have that on the bingo card?" They did not.

Most importantly, Rich said, Walker is buying Mahomes time. Whenever a quarterback returns from a knee injury, the refrain is that he won't look the same until midway through the season. Thanks to Walker, we don't have to find out yet. On Sunday, against a Chargers team that sometimes has Mahomes' number, Travis Kelce didn't take over, and it didn't matter. The defense did its part, too, forcing two turnovers to bring its season total to 15, the most in the NFL. The Chiefs are the only undefeated team in the AFC.

Meanwhile, the Bills spent a week in Southern California and then went to Las Vegas and told the Raiders, "Not yet." The reason, Rich said, is that "17 is so freaking good."

Buffalo is 4-0 this season when allowing 30 or more points. No other team has more than one such win. The Bills are the first NFL team with four wins when allowing 30-plus through the first six games, and the full-season record is five, set by the 2018 Rams. They did it without DJ Moore, with Josh Allen finding Keon Coleman, Dalton Kincaid and, on occasion, Khalil Shakir.

James Cook didn't fumble, which Rich noted was good given that his coach seemed to be coming for his carries, though not to the level of John Harbaugh with Cam Skattebo. Cook has 716 yards from scrimmage, the most by a Bills player through five games since Thurman Thomas.

Then there was the play. Allen escaped a sack with Maxx Crosby crashing down, and with green grass in front of him, Rich assumed he was taking off. Instead Allen flattened out to stay behind the line and shoveled a flip into the end zone for a touchdown. "Good luck with that," Rich said.

Allen admitted afterward that he couldn't tell what happened. "Once you hear the crowd go crazy, you're like, I don't know if it's a touchdown, I don't know if it's an interception," he said, noting how much these road games feel like home games.

Rich's MVP order stays the same: Allen first, Walker second. Mahomes hasn't had to do all the Mahomes things, Rich said, aside from moments like the overtime against the Colts. At Miami, at Vegas, against the Chargers, the formula has been simple. "Just give it to Kenneth Walker. Let him do the work."

The big picture is that despite everything else happening in the AFC, Rich sees the conference sorting itself out the usual way. The AFC North is all above .500. The Texans went from 0-4 to 2-4 with a win over 4-2 Jacksonville. The Broncos are 4-2. The Patriots, once 1-2, are up and running at 4-2. And yet the Bills are on a bye at 5-1, which means no matter what happens when the Chiefs visit Seattle next Sunday night, Kansas City and Buffalo will be one and two in the AFC coming out of week seven.

"Despite all of that, we're in a Bills-Chiefs world after all," Rich said.

They meet on Thanksgiving night, and the winner will be in the pole position of the AFC, just like the last decade. Someone in the studio predicted the familiar script: Buffalo wins in the regular season, and then they play it again. The response: that's the way it normally goes, "but you never know this time around."