The Kansas City Chiefs are victorious again, and not just in Week 14. With their Sunday victory over the Los Angeles Chargers, the reigning Super Bowl champions are champions of the AFC West for the ninth time in a row and have helped their chances of securing first place to secure a spot in the conference playoffs.

It certainly wasn’t easy. After taking a 13-0 halftime lead, Kansas City gave up two touchdown drives in the third quarter and ultimately needed a late field goal to bring home the win. Thanks to fourth-quarter heroics (more on that later), the Chiefs managed to escape and improve to 12-1 on the year.

With that in mind, let’s highlight some of the Chiefs’ biggest winners and losers from Week 14 of the regular season.

After recording two sacks in three games earlier in the year, defensive tackle Tershawn Wharton’s performance dipped somewhat and he went five straight games without a sack. He rebounded significantly in Week 14, picking up two against Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert. Both of Wharton’s takedowns came in the second round and set up long attempts in the third and 16th rounds that failed. The former S&T player from Missouri now has a career-high 4.5 sacks in 13 games, making the most of his increased playing time. Wharton maximized his opportunities again on Sunday, which has been an overarching theme of his fifth season with the team.

With each week that Chamarri Conner’s sample size as the Chiefs’ nickel defenseman grows, it appears as if the 2023 fourth-round pick is miscast in that role. Conner again struggled in coverage on Sunday, getting hit by Stone Smartt for 21 yards and later losing to Josh Palmer on a third down. Conner’s ability to get downhill and close as a tackler is nice when it works, but he lacks fluidity in man coverage and runs too hot at times. Kansas City’s personnel problems aren’t unique to him, although in his second season he was more a part of the problem than a solution.

In his first year with the Chiefs, punter Matt Araiza has done a solid job, justifying the club’s investment in him as a free agent earlier this year. Not only was he available for every game and did a good job defending a trio of kickers, but he also seemed to improve as the season went on. There was an absolutely beautiful punt on Sunday: a 59-yard boot that put Los Angeles at its own 2-yard line. Heading into Monday night, Araiza ranks just inside the EPA top 10 punters this year. Kansas City will take this in stride as it continues to stabilize in the postseason.

It’s pretty easy to look at Kareem Hunt’s game log and decide which week Isiah Pacheco returned to the lineup. In two games sharing the backcourt with Pacheco, Hunt set season lows with seven and five appearances, respectively, against two AFC West rivals. After taking 41 snaps in Week 12, Hunt’s workload has dropped to 27 snaps in Weeks 13 and 20 on Sunday. He’ll still have a role to play down the stretch and will likely benefit from scaling things back, especially with such a high participation rate up front, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. If you plan on keeping Hunt in your fantasy football lineup, now might be a good time to reconsider.

What a few weeks it has been for Matthew Wright since he stepped in for the injured Spencer Shrader (who took the place of the injured Harrison Butker). After making four of his five field goal attempts against the Las Vegas Raiders, he went 4-4 against Los Angeles. The Chiefs needed every single one of his points, including his 31-yard kick as time expired. Kansas City is the first team to have more than one kicker score a game-winner in a single season when time expired in the fourth quarter. Wright’s name is now in the history books, and rightly so.

I continued to write here in the lead-up to the Week 14 game Kansas City Chiefs via SI that it would be difficult for rookie safety Jaden Hicks to get him to After seeing an uptick in his snaps in recent weeks, the workload has increased significantly. While the coaching staff believed he “deserved” more reps, they just didn’t seem to be available in abundance considering Bryan Cook and Justin Reid are at the top of the depth chart. However, the Chiefs made an unexpected change on Sunday, giving Cook a season-low 47 snaps (78% of available) and giving some of them to Hicks (his 26 snaps were a new personal best). Cook hasn’t had much trouble other than one rep where he lost deep to Joshua Palmer for a touchdown, so that workload is worth keeping an eye on. Could it just be an experiment by defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, or is there something bigger at play?

Kansas City’s linebacker play hasn’t always been the best this season, to say the least. Leo Chenal, who blocked a field to win the Week 10 game against the Denver Broncos, deserves the least amount of blame, but he had some quiet attempts elsewhere in the middle of the year. Drue Tranquill has had an extremely slow start to the season and is just starting to play better football. Luckily for the Chiefs, Chenal was able to compete against the run and pass early on Sunday and Tranquill finished second on the team with seven tackles. Those two, as well as Nick Bolton, found ways to make a difference in run defense and pass coverage in Week 14.

To be fair to Humphries, the big context here is that Sunday was his first live appearance since tearing his ACL in Week 17 of last season. He was expected to appear rusty and struggle to keep up at times. That’s exactly what happened in Week 14, when he gave up eight pressures in 40 pass protection snaps but looked better than the numbers showed. Humphries deserves some leeway here, which Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes are already giving him. If the 30-year-old left tackle is still on this part of the roster in a week or two, Then It’s time to worry. Also of note is a hamstring injury he sustained late in Sunday’s win.

Read more: Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid and Clark Hunt discuss the Chiefs winning another AFC West title