Kansas City's 0-3 start heading into this week's home game with NFL scoring leader Denver is the worst in three years under Herm Edwards, who started 0-2 in his first two seasons.

Losers of 12 consecutive games dating back to last year, Edwards' Chiefs are averaging just under 11 points, third worst in the league, and are giving up 26 a contest. Their rush defense, something they worked hard to improve in the offseason, is next to last after yielding 204 grounds yards a game. They've seen opponents convert turnovers into 30 points.

Now after being beaten soundly in consecutive weeks by Oakland and Atlanta, two teams rebuilding from the same 4-12 record the Chiefs had last year, Kansas City enters a more difficult stretch of its schedule. The Chiefs start with Denver (3-0), go to Carolina (2-1), host Tennessee (3-0) after the bye week, face the Jets in Jersey, host Tampa Bay, play at San Diego, host Buffalo and New Orleans.

Well, you get the idea.

The prospect of one of the franchise's worst historical starts, if not the worst, looms large for a team that against Denver will start five rookies and play four others extensively as situation substitutes.

The Chiefs started 1-6 in 2001, Dick Vermeil's first year. They were 1-8-1 in 1988, after which the late Lamar Hunt cleaned house and brought in the Carl Peterson-Marty Schottenheimer team that turned things around. In an awful stretch from 1975 through 1978, they started each respective year 0-3, 0-4, 0-5 and 1-7, with a season-opening win in the 1978 campaign.

This is the season Edwards knew would come eventually when he inherited one of the NFL's oldest teams from Vermeil in 2006.

He squeaked a playoff berth out of a 9-7 team comprised of Vermeil leftovers that first year.

But the influx of young players (and reversed fortunes) began in earnest last year, and now Chiefs fans who experienced seven playoff seasons in the 1990s are wondering if their young team -- which against Atlanta started eight defenders in their third season or less -- is bad enough to get the No. 1 overall pick in next year's draft.

This season is as hard on Edwards -- who took three Jets teams to the playoffs in five years there -- as anybody. But the embattled coach fervently believes in light at the end of the tunnel, a long, dark path he walked before as part of Tony Dungy's building project in Tampa Bay that eventually produced a Super Bowl team.

"It's never easy to (rebuild exclusively with young players), but when you decide, you just do it," Edwards said. "I can remember sitting on the couch in Tampa with Tony (Dungy) saying, 'I left Kansas City, where we went to the playoffs every year, to come down here. Why are we doing this?'

"He said everything was going to be OK, we were doing the right thing. Living through that, I learned a valuable lesson about being patient and sticking with your convictions. It was the right thing to do; everything turned out pretty good."

"Someone has to do this, and I'm fine with it," Edwards added. "I knew when I took this job that we were going to be in this situation. We're committed to it and we're going to stick to this plan."

Not that he needed any further encouragement, but Edwards got some anyway before the season opener from a coach whose opinion he values.

"Bill Belichick," Edwards said of his first opponent, "said, 'I admire you for what you're doing.'"

SERIES HISTORY: 96th regular-season meeting. Chiefs lead, 52-43, in regular season, but lost only playoff game (after the 1997 season). Broncos snapped a four-year losing streak at Arrowhead with a 27-11 victory, then recorded the largest margin of victory in the storied series with a 41-7 kicking of the Chiefs in Denver to complete the season sweep. Chiefs have won 10 of the last 13 meetings at Arrowhead.