KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For all the Chiefs relinquished Sunday in Denver — a fourth-quarter lead, a chance to regain some control in the AFC West and perhaps even a decade-long run atop the division — they still put the ball in the hands of quarterback Patrick Mahomes in a tie game with four minutes to play.

If that opening paragraph reads quite similar to something from a few days ago here, it’s intentional — in the hours after the Broncos beat the Chiefs on a game-winning field goal, I spotlighted the quality of Kansas City’s passes in the most critical situations of games this year.

It’s time to pull at a different thread: the quantity.

Are the Chiefs throwing the football too much?

Actually, you know what, does the whole offensive framework need to be repaired?

Or, better yet, is it too late in the season to change the entire scheme?

Or maybe the quarterback is the issue?

There are a lot of ready-for-hire solutions for the Chiefs’ offense right now — that’s a compliment in the level of interest, by the way — but that discussion needs to start with a different question:

Is there much an offensive problem to be solved?

The Chiefs are 5-5, their worst record through 10 games since Patrick Mahomes left Lubbock, Texas, nearly a decade ago. They’re one game shy of the final playoff spot in the AFC, and hold the tiebreaker over precisely nobody above them in those standings. That’s their reality, and nothing forthcoming in this column is attempting to dispute it.

But there’s a reason I’m constantly bringing up contextual metrics — because while the full mixture has produced the .500 record, the context should drive the response to it. There needs to be some sort of response to 5-5, an urgency even, but how considerable?

— The Chiefs rank third in the NFL in points per possession, per FTN tracking.

— They rank second in the NFL in yards per possession.

— They punt as infrequently as all but two teams in the league.

— They advance to the red zone on 45.5% of their drives, more often than literally every other team in the league.

Does that sound like an offense in crisis?

Does that sound like an output you should be striving to completely overhaul?

Don’t get me wrong. The Chiefs could stand to make some tweaks. Their late-game execution would be a fine place to start. That’s what’s most responsible for the record. I’ll address others, as we regularly do here. But the growing sentiment that the entire system is broken? It’s losing the plot.

Those questions I proposed earlier — the rushing (in)frequency, the offensive framework, the quarterback — didn’t come out of thin air. Some version of them confronted Chiefs head coach Andy Reid during a news conference Wednesday. He rolled with them, but when asked about changing the offensive scheme established during training camp responded, “We’re not in a position where we need to wholesale that.”

I understand that response could raise some eyebrows, considering it’s coming from the head coach of a Super Bowl hopeful that’s instead stuck in third place in its own division.

The situation demands some urgency. But there ought to be some caution in striking a balance between reacting to 5-5 and overreacting to 5-5.

An example of the difference:

Should the Chiefs run the ball more?

The most frequent opinion I’ve heard this week — national analysts, former players, you name it — is that the Chiefs could solve their offense by running the ball more. After all, Kareem Hunt averaged 4.5 yards per rush yet carried the ball only 13 times in Denver.

Just to make clear before we progress farther: Yes, the Chiefs could and probably should run the ball more often. They could even put Mahomes under center more often when they do it. On first and second downs this season, the Chiefs have the seventh-best yards per carry on under-center designed runs, yet they rarely use it. That ought to change.

They face the most light boxes on first and second downs in the league, per Next Gen Stats — teams are choosing to sit back and play the pass instead. It’s why I’ve continued to argue that Mahomes’ job is more difficult than, say, Bills quarterback Josh Allen, who approaches a play and sees open space in the secondary.

So if teams are begging you to run the ball, and there are circumstances in which you do it pretty well, why not just run it, right?

Sure, but there are two reasons — not just one — that when teams play the Chiefs, they continue to play the pass.

— They’re often right. The Chiefs pass the ball 59.5% of the time, the 10th highest rate in the league.

— Teams don’t give a damn about the consequences if the Chiefs do hand it off.

The Chiefs have a good enough success rate when running the football overall — 41.7% of their non-scrambles keep the offense on schedule, 14th-best rate in the league.

But here’s the fine print: They are dead-last in explosive rushing yards.

If you erase those quarterback scrambles from the equation, the Chiefs have produced only 252 rushing yards on explosive plays — rushes that gain at least 10 yards. Only 8.1% of their carries net at least 10 yards, which ranks 29th in the league, per FTN data.

So when a defense weighs the risk versus reward of leaving running lanes a little more open, the worst-that-can-happen scenario is, well, worth the risk. The Chiefs can hit a lot of singles, keeping the line moving, but they can’t hit the home run.

That’s not a play-calling solution. It’s a personnel problem.

Mahomes said Wednesday he could probably hand the ball off more on run-pass option calls — use the “R” in RPO — in an effort to “keep defenses honest.”

No, it won’t.

No matter how many times the Chiefs are running the football, even with a 41.7% success rate, and even with a higher success rate on under-center rushes, whenever a defense stares across the line of scrimmage and sees Mahomes and a 30-year-old Hunt or Isiah Pacheco, who’s been largely ineffective when healthy, where do you think their game plan will rest?

Could the Chiefs stand to call a few more running plays to keep the offense on schedule? Sure. It will make third downs a little easier. But they’ll likely still require that third-down conversion, because they are so rarely getting 10 yards on those first- and second-down rushes.

The expectation that handing the ball off at a high frequency will produce some sort of curative pill to an ailing offense — that defenses will suddenly change course on how they defend the Chiefs — is ignoring the rest of the equation.

And, you know, it might be ignoring just how much the offense is ailing anyway.

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