The NFL’s most compelling AFC rivalry will not play a regular-season chapter in 2025. Local coverage, including WLWT’s schedule note, says this is the first season since 2020 without a Bengals vs Chiefs matchup, a wrinkle that arrives just as Patrick Mahomes has rediscovered throttle and Cincinnati has been thrown into a quarterback reset. The absence won’t cool the temperature; it simply delays the next boil, with January the likely pressure valve.
The timing of the lull is striking. One day before the NFL’s Week 4 dust fully settled, Mahomes logged his 250th career touchdown pass in a 37–20 statement over the Baltimore Ravens, a performance that steadied Kansas City and reminded the AFC that the Chiefs still set the terms when their superstar is upright. AP’s gamer (via ESPN) detailed the four-touchdown salvo and the milestone. Cincinnati, meanwhile, absorbed a 48–10 defeat in Minnesota the previous week and placed Joe Burrow on injured reserve after toe surgery, a sequence that forced Zac Taylor into contingency mode. The rivalry isn’t cooling by disinterest. It’s being paused by the calendar and the injury list.
The rivalry, by the numbers and the beats
For all the spectacle, the recent Bengals vs Chiefs run has been unusually tight. Cincinnati’s rise under Burrow intersected with Kansas City’s sustained peak. Four of the last five meetings finished within a field goal, starting with the Bengals’ overtime win at Arrowhead in the 2021 AFC title game and culminating with Kansas City’s 26–25 escape in September 2024. That 2024 meeting ended on Harrison Butker’s 51-yarder at the horn, a finish stitched together when a fourth-and-16 pass interference flag extended the final drive — documented in the Associated Press recap and the full game file on ESPN.
Pull the lens back and the head-to-head is finely balanced across the Mahomes–Burrow window, a picture borne out in Stathead’s Bengals–Chiefs series ledger and Football Database’s long-view results grid. It’s been a series of adjustments, not blowouts.
No regular-season meeting, and why that matters
The NFL’s scheduling formula guarantees divisional round-robins, rotates inter-division slates, and, since 2021, adds a 17th opponent by cross-conference seeding. It does not guarantee that heavyweight non-division rivals will see each other annually.
The 2025 release has the Chiefs working through their NFC slate and AFC rotation while the Bengals’ draw diverges. For the macro framework behind those matchups, the league explains its process in “2025 Opponents Determined”. The short version, if you’re keeping the postseason calculus in mind, is that the next measurable pressure point is January. That compresses the drama rather than diluting it.
Form guide, late September 2025
Kansas City just authored the crispest game of its young season, and it read like a proof of concept. Mahomes went 25-of-37 for 270 yards and four touchdowns, a clean sheet that coincided with the return of top-speed rookie Xavier Worthy. The Chiefs were perfect on fourth down and kept the pocket tidy in a 37–20 win over Baltimore, as detailed in the Chiefs’ official recap of the 37–20 win. That win also framed where the Kansas City Chiefs ranked in our Week 4 snapshot, where the pop-culture orbit — including Taylor Swift’s Chiefs-adjacent spotlight — remains its own weather system.
Cincinnati’s form line is shakier. A narrow Week 1 road win in Cleveland and a Week 2 home rally against Jacksonville were followed by the 48–10 unraveling in Minneapolis. The Vikings forced turnovers, turned field position into touchdowns, and sprinted away — the control of that game captured by Reuters. Then came the formal news on Burrow. Coach Zac Taylor confirmed surgery without pinning down a return date; the expectation bands were laid out by ESPN. If you’re tracking Cincinnati’s August baseline, our Commanders vs Bengals match player stats breakdown logged how the quarterbacks managed the preseason tempo before the real attrition began.
What the gap year changes
A Bengals vs Chiefs game in October or December typically doubled as a seeding referendum and a midseason lab for matchup solutions. Lou Anarumo’s simulated pressures and double-invert rotations forced Mahomes to be patient. Steve Spagnuolo’s post-snap games and press-man gambles stressed Burrow’s timing and Cincinnati’s protection rules. Without the test this year, the labwork occurs on parallel tracks. For Kansas City, the task is to bottle what looked sustainable against Baltimore and reapply it against a schedule that will ask for different shapes. Worthy’s return increases vertical stress on defenses and widens Travis Kelce’s operating lanes. Isiah Pacheco’s role as a passing option is expanding, and the fourth-down aggression felt like a purposeful identity mark rather than a coin flip. If that sticks, the Chiefs’ efficiency ceiling rises.
For Cincinnati, the correction is more structural. With Burrow down, the Bengals need to flatten the game for Jake Browning and, by extension, for the protection. That likely means a heavier Joe Mixon and Trayveon Williams split, more early-down quicks to Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, and a field-position mindset worthy of a defense that can still win snaps. The bleakness of the Minnesota result doesn’t preclude a weekly path if Cincinnati trims giveaways and reduces exposure in third-and-long. Zac Taylor’s Bengals have played complementary football at a high level with their star. They now have to simulate it without him for a stretch.
The postseason math, and why January still looms
Skipping a regular-season Bengals vs Chiefs does not erase a January chapter. In the latest sports news around seeding, a head-to-head tiebreaker will not exist, so margins must be built elsewhere. The Bills set the early pace, and Kansas City is within a week’s reach on its remaining slate. Cincinnati’s path is narrower but alive: reach a league average on offense with Jake Browning or a stand-in, and let the defense flip a few possessions each month. If the Bengals thread the needle and the Chiefs sustain their six-season arc, the collision returns with real stakes. For readers tracking news about NFL storylines, there is precedent: rivalries sometimes skip a year and come back harder.
Rewinding the hinge plays
Because Bengals vs Chiefs hasn’t lacked for hinge moments, it’s worth listing what still informs coaching choices when this eventually renews. The first is obvious. Butker’s 51-yarder that ended 26–25 last September wasn’t a kick in isolation. It was set up by a high-leverage fourth-and-16 defensive penalty that the Associated Press’ game story explains in detail. The other hinge is philosophical. Cincinnati’s 2021 and 2022 wins rode coverage clouds that forced Kansas City to throw in front of leverage and earn yards after catch. Kansas City’s answer in the 2023 AFC title win was patience, not audacity, coupled with defensive fits that hemmed in zone beaters underneath.
The Chiefs have since added more speed and a willingness to get to four- and five-man in-breaker distributions that don’t always play like old-school Air Raid. Cincinnati, when whole, counters with spacing-from-width and burst posts that threaten leverage even when safeties are flat-footed. None of this is academic. These choices still live in the tape and will surface the next time the teams share a field.
Who they are without the other
There’s a tendency to grade the Bengals and Chiefs only in the mirror of their rivalry. That’s fair in late January when the conference is a two-team test. It’s incomplete in September and October. Kansas City is again calibrating new parts around a known core. Mahomes remains a cheat code when the structure complements him rather than asking him to solve every snap late in the clock.
Spagnuolo’s defense turns the game into a test for quarterbacks who can’t slide protections and for coordinators who can’t hide tells. The result is a high floor that buys the offense time to scale. Cincinnati’s identity has been Burrow’s pocket courage and Chase’s gravity, but the other half is Jesse Bates–era discipline and the staff’s weekly problem-solving. The personnel are different now. The habit of solving problems can’t be, especially while the star quarterback is out.
What to watch next
If you’re tracking a Bengals vs Chiefs postseason possibility, three threads will matter most. The first is health. Kansas City’s return of speed on offense and the weekly availability of Kelce shape ceilings. Cincinnati’s timetable for Burrow will be a story until the day it isn’t, and the Bengals will measure progress in weeks, not headlines. The second is micro-metrics. Kansas City’s fourth-down aggression against Baltimore is a small sample that could become an identity marker.
Watch how often Andy Reid keeps the offense on the field in plus territory. Cincinnati’s giveaway rate and early-down efficiency without Burrow will float the season as much as anything schematic. The third is seeding. The absence of a head-to-head tiebreaker nudges everything toward win banking against common opponents and conference foes. That’s faintly unsatisfying in narrative terms. It’s decisive in January.
No regular-season date appears on either team’s official 2025 schedule. A playoff meeting remains possible depending on seeding.
The NFL formula rotates divisions and adds a 17th opponent; heavyweight non-division rivals aren’t guaranteed annual meetings.
Kansas City beat Cincinnati 26–25 on Sep. 15, 2024, on a 51-yard field goal as time expired.
Bottom line
Bengals vs Chiefs sits out the 2025 regular season by accident of the formula, not design. The rivalry will feel different for a while. Mahomes has a groove to defend and a depth chart that looks faster with each week of health. Cincinnati has a quarterback to get back and a lot of games to stabilize before that happens. If January calls both teams to the same field, the missing chapter could be the twist that makes the next one feel larger. Scarcity has a way of sharpening the view.
