And the winner is ...

... I don't know. How about "Don't rush me"?

Looking ahead toward Colts-Chiefs in that red-mad prairie hell known as Arrowhead Stadium, and I know what the First Law of Homerism demands I do. It demands I find some way to pick the Horsies, because it would that continue a magical storyline. It also would be what a lot of the wise guys expect to happen.

And that, as usual, makes me nervous.

Also making me nervous are, well, the Chiefs.

I get that they've played .500 football for the last six weeks. I get that, if you put this thing on a graph, the Colts would be tracking upward while the Chiefs would be flat-lining. I get that the Chiefs' cruddy run defense creates absolutely perfect conditions for the Colts to run the football all day behind that stout offensive line, which would enable them to grind the clock to dust and keep the ball out of the hands of Patrick Mahomes long enough to outscore him.

I get all that.

I also get that this is the NFL, which stands for the No Figuring League. And that makes me nervous, too, because it presents a whole raft of who-saw-that-coming scenarios.

Like the Chiefs' cruddy run defense actually doing a better job stopping Marlon Mack than the Texans' really good run defense did.

Like Mahomes therefore getting the football enough to start pinballing the scoreboard.

Like the Colts' defense, which has become a true force since that 1-5 start, not being much more successful at slowing down the Chiefs than any of the other top defense Mahomes and Co. has lit up.

I'm hoping that's not going to happen. I'm hoping the defense continues its rise and Mack runs wild and Andrew Luck out-Mahomes Mahomes. I'm hoping these are exactly the completely reasonable hopes they seem to be right now, on Saturday morning.

But one annoying fact keeps buzzing around in the back of my head: The Colts have faced exactly one top-ten offense all season. And the Chiefs' offense is not only top-ten, it leads the NFL in a whole pile of categories.

And so ...

And so, I gotta say it: Chiefs 34, Colts 27.

Dang it.