Sports

Strong start for Walker

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- The Indianapolis Colts had a chance to watch the Kansas City Chiefs open the season with a rout of the Denver Broncos on TV on Monday night, and they came away having learned the same lesson as most everybody else who watched the game.

This isn’t the same Chiefs offense as yesteryear.

Patrick Mahomes looked like himself, even after coming off season-ending surgery to repair ligaments in his left knee. The defense under coordinator Steve Spagnuolo still flummoxed Denver with its unique blitz packages.

But for the first time since Mahomes took over the reins of the offense, the Chiefs had a true No. 1 running back to help carry the load for them.

Kenneth Walker III ran for a career-high 173 yards and scored two touchdowns in the 31-10 rout.

And that no doubt turned some heads in Indianapolis, where Ravens running back Derrick Henry had just rumbled for 144 yards and three touchdowns in a 41-23 blowout of the Colts earlier in the weekend.

“Week 1 was obviously a wake-up call,” Colts coach Shane Steichen said. “We got a lot of football left, but we have a lot of things we need to get correct, and a lot of them are things we can correct.”

Tops on the list is stopping the run. Baltimore used it to dictate the tempo against them, just as the Chiefs did against Denver. Walker ran seven times on the opening series of the game, and the resulting TD put the Broncos on their back foot the rest of the way.

His emergence in Week 1 means that the Colts are faced with a very different preparation for Kansas City from past years, when the priority was to stop Mahomes and a high-powered pass attack. In fact, just last season, the two-time MVP threw for 352 yards against them, helping the Chiefs rally from a 20-9 halftime deficit for a 23-20 overtime victory.

“I think everybody knows the run game, man -- they want to keep that pressure off Pat coming off that injury,” said Colts cornerback Cam Taylor-Britt, who is back following a one-game suspension for pleading guilty to traffic charges in January.

“Their run game is great right now,” Taylor-Britt said. “We have to stop that first and we can do the rest on the back end.”

Mahomes only threw for 184 yards against the Broncos. But he’s just fine with such modest numbers if the Chiefs can dominate as their did against their division rival -- the same bunch that ended their streak of nine consecutive AFC West titles.

“I mean, that’s how it works,” he said. “When you’re able to run the ball like that, defenses have to adjust and have to change. … We were able to showcase that we were going to stay true and we’re going to run the ball and get them out of those (shell coverages) and once they did that, the pass game opened up. So that’s the balance of it.

“You have to be able to do both,” Mahomes said, “in order to have a successful offense.”

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