KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The chaos required an 84-second deliberation among NFL referees — the backdrop and precursor to an unusual conclusion that fits quite snugly into this Chiefs season.

Unusual ending? What’s new, you know?

Well, maybe the type of unusual ending. A Raiders botched snap sealed the Chiefs’ victory on Black Friday, prompting a reaction we’ve long associated with Patrick Mahomes, though usually he’s the one causing it.

Disbelief.

Mahomes put his hands on his head without uttering a word, a snapshot that you could cut and paste into the end of about five games this season.

Which drives at the heart of the 2024 Chiefs: Are they really good? Or are they just getting really lucky?

“Hopefully,” defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo said Thursday, “we keep getting God’s grace at the end there.”

The end.

That’s where we should start this exploration, actually, because there’s no better illustration of the peculiarity of the NFL franchise in Kansas City.

The Chiefs are 11-1, the record of a team with all the answers but with underlying metrics evoking plenty of questions. The betting market ranks the Chiefs as the NFL’s fifth-best team.

The all-encompassing DVOA metric, provided by FTN Fantasy, dropped them to 12th this week. At 11-1! They’ve been better in both of those metrics every year since this era of Chiefs Super Bowls started.

Ten teams have totaled a better point differential than the Chiefs — nearly one-third of the league — including two in their own division. And keep in mind that every other team, save the Lions, has multiple losses and therefore multiple negative point differentials.

That’s all to say the Chiefs have baked an unlikely recipe to cook up an 11-1 record.

How unlikely? That’s where we can fast forward to the end.

In five of their 11 wins, the Chiefs’ win probability has dipped to 50% or lower at some point in the final two minutes. That isn’t overcoming some early turnover that tilts the scale. In five games they’d eventually win, the Chiefs have been on the ropes late and in crunch time.

There are 11 NFL teams that haven’t won five games all season under any circumstances, let alone those circumstances.

Using ESPN’s win probability model, the Raiders reached a 68.8% chance to win on their final drive, for example. The Broncos, Bengals, Buccaneers and Falcons also reached at least 50% in the last two minutes against the Chiefs. If you combine those five games and measured the Chiefs’ probability at the lowest of lows in the final two minutes, the Chiefs had a 0.4% chance to win all five.

That equates to a 1 in 250 chance they’d escape all those situations unscathed.

The context to again underscore this exercise is taking their lowest point in the last two minutes. But if you use the Next Gen Stats win probability combination for all five games, it’s worse. It drops to 1 in 500 the Chiefs would survive all five games.

I use that math just to statistically justify this statement: It is incredibly improbable that the Chiefs are 11-1.

There. You probably knew that already. But there is a growing misconception about the subsequent conclusion to draw from that one.

Improbable does not directly mean lucky. There is often a relation between the two, to be sure, but they are not synonymous.

I know we often look for the simplest answer. Either the Chiefs are lucky, or, if you prefer, the Chiefs are good.

The reality? They’ve been both.

A toe out of bounds? Sure, that’s pretty good fortune. A botched snap? You bet. It’s out of your control. That’s luck. The Chiefs did not earn a win last Friday. The Raiders gifted them one.

But you can’t use last week’s ending to paint broad strokes about all the others, because they don’t all fit.

A blocked field goal to win? You might consider it luck, but it takes a lot of skill, preparation and remarkable attention to detail. So does a defensive fourth-down stop in Atlanta. So does an overtime touchdown drive. So do the other game-winning drives. Mahomes has a career-high five this season. Since when is leading the league in that category lucky?

These past three months have left us with two set of facts:

— 1. The Chiefs have been incredibly vulnerable this season, more flawed than any other year in the Mahomes Era. Yes, even more flawed than a year ago, because the defense is no longer playing at an elite level.

— 2. They are still executing the must-have-them moments late in games. Or, unlike the Raiders or Bears in this last week alone, they just plain don’t screw them up. The best production Mahomes has had this year has been in the fourth quarter, and specifically with the game on the line. There’s a reason those games flipped in the final two minutes, after all.

The Chiefs are responsible for both traits. You cannot pick just one.

You do get to pick, however, which conclusion you draw about their future: Which option is more repeatable?

The first inclination is to take the former. Large sample size, after all. It’s the safe choice.

But I’ll offer the best-case-scenario argument that the Chiefs’ own history rests behind Door No. 2. The discomfort in opening that door is that it’s anecdotal. But there are just a lot of anecdotes.

Take last postseason, when Mahomes and Marquez Valdes-Scantling delivered a game-sealing play in the AFC championship game one week after the Bills squandered their own chance. And then the Chiefs converted a must-have-it game-tying field goal in the Super Bowl before marching downfield for a game-winning touchdown.

The Chiefs were bad early in the Super Bowl. When they needed it, they were superb.

Sound familiar?

It’s Mahomes’ defining trait. He’s so frequently at his best when you need him to be at his best, whether as a favorite or a Vegas underdog. And, guess what, even this season, he has a 102.3 passer rating in the fourth quarter.

There’s too much evidence the Chiefs have made their own luck. They’re still good with the game on the line, in the moments that occupy entire Friday meetings at the practice facility, but they just so frequently need to be good with the game on the line.

That’s the paradox the Chiefs have left us.

It’s both.

They’re flawed. They come through late anyway.

We’ve seen their crunch-time play outweigh the flaws for three months now. We’ll get a full study of its sustainability in January — or, heck, maybe even again in February.

You know, if luck would have it.

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