Winners and losers from the KC Chiefs' Week 5 win over the NO Saints

The Kansas City Chiefs are back on the winning list for another week as Andy Reid's team picked up their fifth straight win on Monday night.

With a 26-13 victory over the New Orleans Saints, the back-to-back Super Bowl champions enter the bye week with a 5-0 record. A good handful of players put in strong performances on the big stage, while a few others struggled to stay effective and get some work done in their free time. Overall, however, it was a good team win for Kansas City against a determined NFC opponent.

With that in mind, let's highlight some of the Chiefs' biggest winners and losers from Week 5 of the regular season.

The big caveat to calling JuJu Smith-Schuster the winner is taking into account the pass he dropped near the end zone that was intercepted by Khalen Saunders. Despite his good play, it would be unfair not to mention it. However, putting the decline aside, Smith-Schuster was simply brilliant. With seven passes on eight scores, the veteran wideout totaled 130 yards and even had a 50-yard catch that helped decide the game late. Smith-Schuster patiently bided his time and resembled the 2022 version of himself when he was asked by the Chiefs to answer the call, and that's exactly what he did in Week 5.

A week after giving up a sack and committing multiple penalties to the Los Angeles Chargers' Bud Dupree, Jawaan Taylor failed to play a flawless game on Monday. The prized right tackle had a false start in the first quarter and later saw a holding penalty negate what would have been a touchdown for tight end Noah Gray. Taylor is still an effective figure in run blocking and pass protection, so it's hard to complain too much here, other than the penalties have be cleaned up. Reid insisted on this before Week 5, and he'll certainly make that point again.

For the second straight year, Kareem Hunt led Kansas City's running back room and looked like someone who earned the duty fair and square. Just two games away from not playing at all, he had 27 runs and one reception on Monday night. Hunt surpassed 100 yards rushing for the first time since 2020 and his first Chiefs touchdown since 2018 was a feel-good moment for the player and the team. Hunt's average yards per carry of 3.8 won't blow anyone away, but if he continues to do a steady job, Kansas City won't miss Isiah Pacheco as much as initially expected.

Of course, if Hunt dominates carries in the backfield, that means someone else is losing out. It was Carson Steele again. The undrafted rookie free agent managed just 12 yards on five carries, and while he contributed to a nice first down on a third-and-1 in the second half, he just wasn't very effective overall. Add in a fumble that temporarily sets back one of the Chiefs' drives, and it's easy to see that Steele isn't doing himself any favors these days.

After a very slow start to the year, linebacker Nick Bolton is picking up some momentum before the bye. This was his second straight solid performance and he recorded 11 tackles against the Saints on Monday. Seven of those plays involved stops within three yards of the line of scrimmage. Bolton played the run quite well in Week 5, closing gaps with aggression and consistently making the right plays. It wasn't a standard Bolton game that featured just a single splash play move and not much else. It was quite a promising performance for the Chiefs defense.

In the days leading up to the Week 5 contest, Mahomes appeared to have a lot of faith in Smith-Schuster and Justin Watson to step up as veterans at the wideout position. Although Watson led the wide receiver division with 59 snaps (70% of available snaps) on Monday, he did not record a single statistic. No catch, no target, no drop. It's far from the end of the world — Watson can impact the game in other ways — but for someone coming off a career year, he has Mahomes' trust And I had a better chance, it was a disappointing performance.

Read more: Four takeaways from the Chiefs' 26-13 win over the Saints