It's Preseason, So Matt Cassel Must Be Holding The Chiefs Back

It's preseason so it must be time to predict that Kansas City Chiefs QB Matt Cassel isn't good enough. We're starting to see a few more stories citing Cassel's preseason performances to date as one of the reasons the Chiefs won't improve in 2011.

I think we've heard this story line before so let's look at past performance to see what it means:

• In 2009, Cassel and the Chiefs looked awful in the preseason and the Chiefs went on to win four games.
• In 2010, Cassel and the Chiefs looked awful in the preseason and the Chiefs went on to win 10 games. 

See the correlation? 

If you can't, that's because there isn't one. The Chiefs haven't game-planned for the preseason so, as Todd Haley suggested earlier this week, the offense is usually going to look worse than the defense because of that. (That's a point that's not emphasized enough when looking at the Chiefs preseason games, if you ask me, which you didn't.)

I'm not trying to debunk these predictions about Cassel's season. Maybe it's great, maybe it's horrible. I'm just saying that the preseason isn't really an indicator of how Cassel and the Chiefs will play in the regular season.