On Football: Crafty Chiefs keep winning despite Mahomes' struggles and others' injuries

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Patrick Mahomes is having his worst season statistically and the Chiefs keep losing playmakers to injuries.

The two-time defending Super Bowl champions are 6-0 anyway.

Kansas City is the NFL’s only unbeaten team following an ugly 28-18 victory over San Francisco in a Super Bowl rematch on Sunday that looked more like a preseason game.

Mahomes, a two-time NFL MVP and three-time Super Bowl MVP, threw two picks and posted a career-worst 44.4 passer rating against the 49ers, but he made enough plays, including a nifty 33-yard run, to lead the Chiefs to their 12th straight win, dating to last year.

Mahomes has more interceptions (eight) than touchdowns (six) this season and a career-low 82.5 passer rating. But a stingy defense and a strong run game has led the way for Kansas City, which lost cornerback Jaylen Watson and receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster to injuries in the latest win.

The Chiefs already are without No. 1 receiver Rashee Rice and top running back Isiah Pacheco, plus Marquise “Hollywood” Brown has yet to play.

Still, the Chiefs continue winning. It’s a testament to coach Andy Reid and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo.

“It’s about us getting better throughout the year and how we can keep getting better from our previous game to now,” Travis Kelce said. “There’s a lot of doubters in terms of what we can do offensively right now with the guys that we’ve got and I think we showed everybody that we can put up points today.”

Unlike Kansas City, Brock Purdy and the 49ers (3-4) haven’t overcome a slew of injuries to several key players. They’ve been inconsistent, mistake-prone and hardly resemble the team that reached the NFC title game each of the past three seasons.

Purdy tossed three interceptions against Kansas City and had a career-worst 36.7 passer rating.

Now, the 49ers have to deal with another major blow. Receiver Brandon Aiyuk sustained a knee injury that coach Kyle Shanahan fears is a season-ending torn ligament. Deebo Samuel was limited to four snaps against Kansas City because of an illness and Jauan Jennings was sidelined with a hip injury. All-Pro running back Christian McCaffrey hasn’t played this season.

“Is there more pressure for me to put on a Superman cape and do more? No,” Purdy said. “I think who we have and the players that we have that step up in those positions, they’ve done a great job and we have a lot of talent in my eyes. That’s on me and we’ll just all continue to grow and fight on this journey together.”

Deshaun Watson is finished for the season. Jayden Daniels’ sensational rookie year is on hold. Aidan O’Connell is out, too.

There were several significant injuries across the league.

Watson torn his Achilles tendon in Cleveland’s loss to Cincinnati, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press on Monday. The Browns (1-6) made the playoffs last year after Watson went down for the season, but they have no chance this season.

Daniels, who is having an exceptional rookie season, injured his ribs in Washington’s rout over Carolina. He is scheduled for tests on Monday, but the NFC East-leading Commanders (5-2) should get him back at some point.

O’Connell left his first start of the season because of a thumb injury and the Raiders lost to the Rams. He’ll be out indefinitely as Las Vegas (2-5) goes back to Gardner Minshew.

The NFC North still goes through Detroit.

Jared Goff had another stellar game to lead the Lions (5-1) to a 31-29 victory in Minnesota, handing the Vikings their first loss of the season.

Goff, Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jahmyr Gibbs were sensational in the NFC North showdown and Detroit's defense stepped up in its first game without Aidan Hutchinson.

Many analysts, including former players, questioned Mike Tomlin’s decision to start Russell Wilson after Justin Fields helped the Steelers start 4-2.

Wilson silenced the doubters with an impressive performance in his Pittsburgh debut.

Shaking off early rust in his first start since last Dec. 24, Wilson threw for 264 yards and two touchdowns, ran for a score and posted a 109.0 passer rating to lead the Steelers (5-2) to a 37-15 win over the New York Jets.

Wilson, who lacks Fields’ speed and scrambling ability, threw several perfect deep balls and lobs to George Pickens and other receivers.

AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) passes against the San Francisco 49ers during the second half of an NFL football game in Santa Clara, Calif., Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Eakin Howard)

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, left, cannot catch a pass while being defended by San Francisco 49ers cornerback Charvarius Ward during the second half of an NFL football game in Santa Clara, Calif., Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn)

On Football: Crafty Chiefs keep winning despite Mahomes' struggles and injuries

On Football: Crafty Chiefs keep winning despite Mahomes' struggles and injuries

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) celebrates after a touchdown by Mecole Hardman during the second half of an NFL football game against the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara, Calif., Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn)

With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

Walz said on “The View” that his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris “actually worked at McDonalds. She didn’t go and pander, and disrespect McDonald’s workers, by standing there in your red tie: Take a picture.”

Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonalds on Sunday, gleefully working the fry station and answering questions from reporters in the drive thru.

Walz was also asked on “The View” to name one nice thing about Trump, but demurred. He offered only that one positive is, “He will not be president again.”

But he said that wasn’t the same as Republican former President Donald Trump’s constant, deliberate misstatements.

“I do think it’s important that we’re careful about how we speak,” Walz said of making previously misleading statements, that he later had to correct. Those included talking about his service in the National Guard and past travel to China.

“But I think the public sees,” Walz added, “Just the massive amount of misinformation that gets out there,” driven by Trump.

Walz was asked about how the Democratic ticket would bring change after Election Day.

He pointed to Harris proposing expanding Medicare funding so that it covers home-care costs for the “sandwich generation,” or Americans caring for aging parents and children at the same time.

“I think she’s really leaning into these issues that impact people first,” Walz said, “Those are pretty big differences.”

Walz, also the governor of Minnesota, is on the same set weeks after Harris herself made a View appearance. She was asked then about what she’d do different in the White House than what’s been done by President Joe Biden, but failed to name major changes.

Walz said of one of his unofficial campaign slogans, “Mind your own damn business,” is a good way to live, making Americans better neighbors.

Western North Carolina will recover, Gov. Cooper said at a storm recovery effort briefing Monday in Asheville, but they “don’t need the election process to hurt recovery efforts.”

Cooper said a bipartisan bill that he signed increases opportunities to vote, giving county boards and voters more flexibility, but disinformation and misinformation that hurts the people they’re trying to help “needs to stop.”

Many storm survivors lost everything and they want help and truth, he said.

“We should work together to give them both,” Cooper said. “Storm recovery cannot be partisan. To truly help people, we must check party politics at the door and get this job done.”

One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.

“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”

On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.

“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

▶ Read more about Trump’s comments on Arnold Palmer.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who was trying to hold Trump liable for his jailing that he said was retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir.

The justices did not explain their reasoning in the brief, routine order.

Cohen had asked the high court to revive a lawsuit filed after his early release from prison during the coronavirus pandemic was quickly reversed. Authorities said he wouldn’t accept some conditions of his release, but Cohen said he’d only asked if he could speak to the media about his memoir. He sued Trump, then-Attorney General William Barr and prison officials.

Cohen served time after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance charges in 2018. He said Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

She made the comments during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” about revamped White House tours. The interview aired Monday morning.

Asked by Deborah Roberts if it would be tough to leave the White House, Biden said “we’re starting a new chapter of our lives, a new journey.”

Roberts asked if her husband made the correct decision to stop his bid for another four years.

“It was the right call, yes,” the first lady said.

Kamala Harris’ campaign and affiliated Democratic groups raised about $633 million for the quarter, which ended last month, pushing their total to over $1 billion and maintaining a large financial advantage over Republican candidate Donald Trump in the election’s final sprint.

The vice president’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties raised more than $359 million in September alone.

But Harris’ campaign is spending heavily too. It raised about $222 million on its own in September, only to pay out about $270 million over the same period — helping to boost a large advertising push.

The Harris campaign and affiliated committees entered October with $346 million on hand, according to federal filings.

Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated groups previously reported raising $160 million in September. By October, they had $283 million in the bank.

Reproductive rights measures are on the ballots in 10 states after heated debates over how to describe their impact on abortion — and that’s just in English.

In 388 places across the U.S. where English isn’t the primary language among communities of voters, the federal Voting Rights Act requires that all elections information be made available in each community’s native language.

Such translations are meant to help non-native English speakers understand what they’re voting for. But vague or technical terms can be challenging, even more so when it comes to Indigenous languages that have only limited written dictionaries.

For example, there’s no single word for abortion in the native language of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Colorado’s Montezuma County. New York’s referendum doesn’t even use the word “abortion,” making it all the more challenging to convey intent, advocates complain. And how exactly should the science of “viability” in the Florida and Nevada measures be explained in the oral traditions of the Seminole and Shoshone tribes?

The Navajo and Hopi tribes get more material translated than most, and they have more than enough voters to sway outcomes.

▶ Read more about translating ballot measures into other languages.

Voters remain largely divided over whether they prefer Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris to handle key economic issues, although Harris earns slightly better marks on elements such as taxes for the middle class, according to a new poll.

A majority of registered voters in the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research describe the economy as poor. About 7 in 10 say the nation is going in the wrong direction.

But the findings reaffirm that Trump has lost what had been an advantage on the economy, which many voters say is the most important issue this election season above abortion, immigration, crime and foreign affairs.

“Do I trust Trump on the economy? No. I trust that he’ll give tax cuts to his buddies like Elon Musk,” said poll respondent Janice Tosto, a 59-year-old Philadelphia woman and self-described independent.

An AP-NORC poll conducted in September found neither Harris nor Trump had a clear advantage on handling “the economy and jobs.” But this poll asked more specific questions about whether voters trusted Trump or Harris to do a better job handling the cost of housing, jobs and unemployment, taxes on the middle class, the cost of groceries and gas, and tariffs.

▶ Read more about the poll.

Donald Trump went to a barbershop in the Bronx section of New York for a segment with commentator Lawrence Jones that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends.”

He took questions from clients at the business about immigration, energy and taxes. The barbers wore a black shirt with the phrase “Make Barbers Great Again.”

One of the clients asked Trump if, once he generated enough revenue with some of his proposals, it would be possible to eliminate federal taxes.

“There is a way. There is a way,” Trump said, adding that in the 1890s, people did not have to pay income taxes.

The business owner, who leases the building, told him his main challenge was paying for his energy bill, which had shot up from $2,100 to $15,000 in the last seven months.

“What?” Trump said. “How many heads can you take care of? That’s a lot.”

Trump asked how much average hair cuts cost and how much they had gone up. He was told they had gone up from a range between $12 and $15 to between $30 and $40.

Toward the end of the visit, Trump told the men “you guys are the same as me. It’s the same stuff. We were born the same way.”

For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.

It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family.

“The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.”

How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.

Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.

▶ Read more about Jewish voters in this election.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks during a interview as he attends the New York Jets football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Acrisure Stadium, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris listens as Stevie Wonder performs "Redemption Song" during a church service and early vote event at Divine Faith Ministries International, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)