Kansas City Chiefs know negative plays are hurting them in the red zone

When you kick seven field goals and don't score a touchdown, you know have a scoring problem. That's what the Kansas City Chiefs are facing after they failed to score a touchdown against the Cincinnati Bengals last week.

Most of the problems seem to be coming from negative plays around the red zone -- a penalty or a sack or something else that knocks the Chiefs back and forces a third and long situation, which are very difficult for any offense to convert, especially this one.

Because of the Chiefs recent red zone woes, several Chiefs were asked about what has happened and how they can get better in the red zone.

Andy Reid: "Well, the simple thing is to score. You have to sustain drives. Normally you don't have backup plays. So the thing I mentioned the day after the game, if you got penalties or sacks or interceptions or those types of things where you're moving backwards instead of forward, normally you're not going to be as successful."

Doug Pederson: "It's a situation that obviously is getting into your scoring, you're giving up points. Of course, the seven field goals were nice, but you definitely are shooting for the touchdowns. There's such a fine line anywhere on the football field - any mistake can be magnified, penalties, sacks, turnovers, especially in scoring territory. We've got to be able to negate those and stay on the field offensively and convert those field goals into touchdowns. That's the bottom line."

Alex Smith: "I think every single time - it seemed like every drive you could point to a negative play that we had when we got in the red zone. The negative run early, a penalty, something that put us behind the chains and you're going against a good defense - once they got you in that situation, they were going to make you throw it underneath, they were going to come up and tackle we had to take the field goal. It was the kind of style of play, I felt like a lot of it was self-inflicted. We put ourselves in bad situations and weren't able to overcome it."