KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Every year during Andy Reid’s offseason training program, the Chiefs dedicate three separate days to analyzing and preparing for their AFC West rivals.

It’s a topic the Chiefs head coach briefly alluded to Wednesday but spoke to more specifically when I asked him about it in September 2022, before they played the Chargers in that season’s division opener.

“It kind of breaks it up and gives the guys something to look at,” he said. “Plus it’s a good feeder for you. Makes coaches think, makes the players think about who they’re playing.”

You study them, he added, like you’re about to play them.

Certainly, that’s a practical matter to Reid: It’s a way his players and staff can keep in tune with what’s coming, and it would figure to stir at least some tentative elements of strategy.

But it’s also part of a relentless message, a prime directive of sorts.

One that has resonated through a franchise that has won nine straight AFC West titles — after winning six in the previous 45 seasons since the AFL-NFL merger — and 54 of its last 64 divisional games.

The first goal, quarterback Patrick Mahomes reiterated Wednesday, always is to win the divisional race.

Something the Chiefs have executed so extraordinarily in this span that Reid, the fourth-winningest overall coach in NFL history, now has more AFC West championships on his ledger than any other coach.

“That’s first and foremost,” added long-snapper James Winchester, one of just two players remaining on the team (along with Travis Kelce) who was here the last time the Chiefs failed to win the West. “And then you go from there.”

The “go from there” baseline has made for quite a formula for the Chiefs, who have played in the last seven AFC championship games and five of the last six Super Bowls — and won three.

“It’s been something,” Mahomes said, “that has been important to us.”

Which is what makes this week such a crucial crossroads.

Because entering their game Sunday at Denver (8-2), that portal to the postseason is in jeopardy as never before in the Mahomes Era.

At 5-4, the Chiefs are three games behind the Broncos and two games behind the Chargers (7-3) — who also hold the advantage of beating the Chiefs in the first of their two meetings.

The implications of winning or losing Sunday’s game could hardly be more substantial. Per The Athletic’s NFL Playoff Simulator, a Chiefs victory would boost their chances of winning the division from 25% now to 38%.

With a defeat, their prospects would tumble to 7%.

Or as Mahomes put it after pondering the consequences of a loss this week: “It’d be tough to go back and get (this) one,” he said, immediately adding, “All you can do is just handle this week; that’s all you can really worry about.”

Seeing as how the Chiefs remain eighth overall for the seven-team AFC playoff bracket if the season ended today, a loss obviously also would be a blow to their overall playoff ambitions.

The wild-card route is more arduous upon arrival but more forgiving on the way, of course.

And, heck, it wasn’t so long ago (2015) that a 5-5 Chiefs team — one that had started 1-5 in a season on the brink — earned a postseason berth by winning its last 10 regular-season games and then the franchise’s first playoff game in more than 20 years.

Much has changed since then, of course, between the advent of Mahomes and a dynastic run like few in NFL history.

So what a decade ago was a breakthrough — a wild-card win before abrupt elimination in the divisional round — would feel like a fiasco now because of where the standard has been set: The Chiefs have reached the AFC championship game in every season since Mahomes became QB1.

One of the pivotal reasons that’s been established is the fundamental pillar of AFC West dominance and what comes with that.

Making chew toys of their divisional foes over most of the last decade was about more than just a foundational path to the postseason.

It also has been a springboard.

After all, there’s a reason only 11 wild-card teams have reached the Super Bowl and just seven have won it — including, alas for the Chiefs, Tampa Bay in the 2020 season as the first to do it in a decade.

As he considered why winning the division has meant so much, Mahomes pointed first to the pragmatic aspect of being guaranteed at least one home game with a divisional title.

“Which I think is huge,” he said. “We’ve proved that we can go on the road and win, but just being able to play at Arrowhead is an advantage with the noise and the atmosphere, and you can feed off the crowd and stuff like that.”

Beyond that, winning the division establishes a certain traction, momentum and mindset.

All the more so for these teams that also have had a knack of finishing strong overall.

“It kind of checks that first box for you to show that you’ve accomplished something in the year,” Mahomes said, “and now let’s build onto the next goal.”

The first box is a long way from being checked this season in a pod now made up of what could persuasively be argued is the most accomplished set of coaches in one division the NFL ever has seen. Including Reid, the group also featuring Sean Payton with the Broncos, Jim Harbaugh with the Chargers and Pete Carroll guiding the Raiders collectively has won five Super Bowls and 10 conference titles.

So it seems we ought to anticipate a close game on Sunday, a dynamic that had been much to the Chiefs’ advantage the previous few seasons (when they won an NFL-record 17 straight one-score games) but that has been problematic this season:

All four of their losses have come in just those scenarios, even as the Broncos have won five of their games by a total of 13 points.

“The way that this league is right now, you’ve got to be able to do that,” Reid said. “The parity … is pretty crazy. Especially in the AFC West.”

Something that the Chiefs understand is crucial — a title that they’ve taken enormous pride in winning, even as it perhaps has come to seem mundane to fans considering all their more gaudy recent feats.

Expect that mindset to be bubbling for Sunday, something we got a glimpse of even in the typically understated Reid a few years ago.

In his Missouri Western dorm near the end of the 2022 training camp in St. Joseph, Reid flashed a little fire when asked about supposed ramp-ups of divisional foes that offseason.

“You can take it as a badge of honor (or) crawl under the desk and be afraid,” he said then. “My thing is, listen, let’s go. … We’re not chopped liver out there. We have some pretty good players.

“So let’s play.”

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