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The Raiders held a pregame meeting on the Chiefs’ logo, and it backfired in a big way.
Las Vegas defensive end Yannick Ngakoue gave a pregame speech at midfield at the end of warmups, and Kansas City players repaid their foes with a 48-9 blowout.
The perceived disrespect added enough Chiefs motivation that even Raiders linebacker K.J. Wright admitted it played a role in the loss.
“I would have been upset, too, if I were them,” Wright told reporters. “Anybody that comes out there and do that? And they definitely came out and responded to their anger and we couldn’t hold up.”
It was the Raiders’ largest margin of defeat (39 points) since they lost 52-0 to the Rams in 2014, dominating from the outset. Las Vegas running back Josh Jacobs fumbled on the game’s opening play, with the ball run back for a touchdown by Kansas City defensive back Mike Hughes.
“It was spur of the moment,” Wright said of Ngakoue’s speech. “One guy said, ‘Let’s go’ and we all got to ride together. We all went out there together. We did it as a team and just gave them a little more motivation than we ended to give them.”
Several Chiefs players appeared to take notice on social media. DeAndre Baker tweeted a video of the incident, captioning: “All that to get beat by 39 … be humble.”
“I don’t think champions really act in that manner,” Chiefs defensive back Tyrann Mathieu said.
Last season, when the Raiders won in Arrowhead Stadium for the first time since 2012, their bus took a victory lap around the stadium. To add insult to injury, the Chiefs played “Wheels on the Bus” through Arrowhead’s PA system as the Raiders walked off the field this time.
Gathering on the logo just made it worse.
“You definitely don’t want people to come into your stadium and disrespect things that you built,” Patrick Mahomes told reporters. “It gave us a little more motivation to go out there and win against a really good football team that we have a rivalry against that usually is a tough football game.”
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