At that point in the season, Atwater and his teammates still believed in their ability to win the AFC West — and likely to secure home-field advantage.
“They beat us by two, but our mentality wasn’t broken,” Atwater said. “We didn’t go into the locker room, ‘Ah, man, the season’s over.’ We said, ‘Man, they got us. We’re going to go get ready, rest up and be ready for next week.'”
The Chiefs, though, would not lose again in the regular season. Their win over the Broncos was the first of six consecutive victories that pushed them to a 13-3 record. After a pair of losses to the Steelers and 49ers, the Broncos were condemned to a 12-4 record and a wild-card berth.
Still, inside the Broncos’ locker room, there was no panic. Shanahan stressed to his players that they still had an opportunity to win a championship — and the players did not lose faith.
“Mike stressed that,” Atwater said. “I remember ‘Romo’ [Bill Romanowski] [later] saying that he and Mike were talking, and he said, ‘Mike, we’ve got to do this the long way.’ And Mike was like, ‘Yeah, we are.’ We definitely had conversations about [being a wild-card team], but still, I don’t think our confidence ever swayed. I don’t think at any point in the season we didn’t think that we were good enough to win. Obviously we hadn’t won one yet, so we didn’t really know what that felt like, but we had the confidence. We had the confidence, we had the coaches, we had the players. It’s like, we’ve got everything. It’s like somebody put the silver platter in front of you, and you just [think], ‘I can’t help but be successful with this.’ And that’s the way we were, man. We felt like we had it all. And I think that was a big part of it — us having the confidence that we could do it. We weren’t questioning, ‘Man, who’s our quarterback, what’s he going to do, can we stop this team? Our coaches, are they going to have a game plan that works for us?’ We didn’t worry about any of that. We put our heads down, went to work and we…
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