It began when he reached a five-year, $46 million contract extension that included $20 million in guarantees – a deal signed while he was in Hawaii, no less. It continued with the filming of a reality TV show in which 50 women tried to impress the 27-year-old bachelor enough to win his love.

His season is turning out to be pretty good, too.

Kelce had eight catches for a career-best 140 yards in Sunday’s win over Atlanta, which allowed Kansas City to remain a game behind Oakland in the AFC West. It was the former third-round pick’s third straight 100-yard receiving effort, one shy of the franchise record set by Tony Gonzalez in 2000. He’ll have a chance to match it in a pivotal Thursday night showdown with the Raiders .

”The guy’s so unique. One of the most unique tight ends in the NFL,” Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith said. ”I think of what he can do – he has so many different strengths.”

Most of them are in the passing game, where his hands and ability to run essentially turns him into an extra wide receiver. That has proven to be critical the past few weeks while Jeremy Maclin, the Chiefs’ top wide receiver, has been dealing with a lingering groin injury.

His big-play ability was evident right from the start in Atlanta, when Kelce hauled in back-to-back catches of 21 and 35 yards to help the Chiefs answer the Falcons’ opening-drive touchdown.

”For a big guy to have the kind of vision he does, you saw it on the opening drive,” Smith said. ”The first catch, to go up and get that in traffic, and then he beats the safety one-on-one (one the next catch) to get us down to the goal line. Obviously, he’s a heck of a player.”

He even got props from the safety he beat on that play, Keanu Neal.

”He’s a technician, smart with his routes, and he knows how to play the game,” Neal said after the game. ”He’s a great route-runner and can play ball. That’s why he’s a Pro Bowler.”

It’s also why the Chiefs have begun to target him more often.

He was only targeted three times apiece in back-to-back games against Oakland and New Orleans earlier this season, catching five passes for 57 yards combined. But he has been targeted at least eight times each of the past three weeks, including 15 targets in his 101-yard effort two weeks ago in Denver.

The result has been 23 catches for 349 yards over the past three games .

”Normally in big games, your good players show up,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. ”He’s always going to be a part of our game plan. We’d be foolish not to make him a part. So then you have to kind of overcome the other teams’ plan and try to do something else if they double him. We’ve moved him all over the place, so we’re lucky he can do that.”

Indeed, Kelce is comfortable lining up in the traditional tight end position at the end of the line, but he’s just as relaxed lining up in the slot or even wide in formations.

”The most impressive thing to me is in the pass game, how he matches up on different people,” Falcons coach Dan Quinn said. ”You have coverage on him, you think you have the right leverage and then he can stick a foot in the ground and change directions. That’s really hard for a big guy to do.”

Perhaps most impressive is that Kelce has managed to maintain his focus and drive, despite the flashy new contract, all those swooning women and his burgeoning superstardom. He is rarely in the locker room when reporters are around, and he tends to deflect questions that don’t have anything to do with football.

Good luck trying to get him to talk about his show, ”Catching Kelce.”

Which is perfectly fine with the Chiefs. They just want him to keep catching passes.

Notes: WR Jeremy Maclin, who has missed four games with a groin injury, practiced Tuesday and could be available. ”I know he’s feeling better,” ”Reid said. ”We’re optimistic.” … The forecast for Thursday night calls for temperatures in the teens with a wind chill that could approach single digits. ”It’s going to be freezing, most definitely,” said WR Tyreek Hill, a Florida native. ”I’ve never played in anything like this.”

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A week before that, Dolphins receiver Jarvis Landry took a running start at a defender who couldn’t see him, slammed his shoulder into the player’s neck and sent him to the hospital. Landry played on after a 15-yard penalty and later received a $24,000 fine.

These two snapshots – polar opposites in both the players’ actions and the NFL’s response – underscore one of the league’s most difficult issues. Faced with an ever-growing concussion crisis, it talks tough about curbing illegal hits, especially those above the shoulders. Yet it uses its most-stringent penalty for those sorts of infractions – the suspension – very infrequently compared to the number of relatively inconsequential fines it hands out.

”What do you do when you want to punish somebody? You take something away,” Jaguars tight end Marcedes Lewis said. ”The money, yeah, cool, but depending on who you are, you’re good as far as the money goes anyway because you know it’s going to keep coming. When you take somebody out of the game, I think that’s harsher.”

It’s not to say the league is shy about ejecting and suspending players. Since the start of 2016 through Week 7, 47 have been suspended a total of 219 games and docked more than $18 million, according to the website spotrac.com.

But of those suspensions, the majority were for drug use or legal- and violence-related issues off the field. A four-game ban went to Tom Brady for ”Deflategate.” And spotrac.com lists only one illegal-hit suspension – for three games – which went to Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict after his vicious hit to Steelers receiver Antonio Brown’s head in last season’s melee of a playoff game.

Meanwhile, spotrac.com lists 55 fines handed out in 2016 for violations including impermissible use of the helmet, roughing the passer, and blindside blocks the likes of which Landry delivered to unsuspecting Aaron Williams of the Bills. Williams crumpled to the ground and had to be transported to the hospital. Those infractions resulted in the single suspension (Burfict) and an average fine of $16,500 in a league with an average annual salary of $1.9 million. That’s an average of 0.8 percent of a player’s salary.

”Maybe we need to look at our rules a little better,” Bills coach Rex Ryan said after the hit on Williams. ”Maybe, having a guy who targets and deliberately does something like that, the right thing to do is to eject the player from the game and maybe part of another game.”

That is the rule in college football, which also can use replay to pass final judgment on the legality of a hit.

After the hit on Williams, for which Landry expressed remorse, NFL vice president of officiating Dean Blandino told NFL Total Access it would’ve been a difficult call to eject Landry because ”it’s still a football play, and it’s tough to read intent there.” He conceded ”we have few automatic ejections in the game today.”

The NFL did not make Blandino available to The Associated Press for this story. Instead it referenced a portion of the league rulebook that has been rewritten over the past few years to reflect its emphasis on curbing helmet-first, above-the-shoulders and other illegal hits that used to be celebrated but are now viewed in a different light.

”Ten years ago, when I came into the league … the sky was the limit when it came to hits,” said two-time Pro Bowl defensive back Michael Griffin of the Panthers. ”You lived for hits like that.”

Griffin served a one-game suspension as a repeat offender of hits to the head while with the Titans in 2013, the first season of the newly toughened hitting rules. When asked this week to reflect on the suspension, the first words out of Griffin’s mouth were: ”That cost me too much money. That cost me $205,000.”

But he said the suspension helped change his outlook, in part because ”if you can’t play within the (rules), they’ll find somebody else to do it.”

The increased emphasis on technique and safety has undoubtedly played into the decline in fines for hits on defenseless players, which is one subset of the hits the AP reviewed as part of the spotrac.com numbers. The NFL says there were 40 such fines in 2012, and only 10 in 2015. Yet, the league’s ability to police the violence this season came under scrutiny as early as Game 1, when MVP Cam Newton received four hits to the head in the season opener against the Broncos, none of which resulted in penalty yardage.

Darian Stewart delivered one of those hits, then one the next week to Andrew Luck. He’s been fined a total of $27,000 for the hits – a tad more than 1 percent of his 2016 base salary.

No suspensions.

Newton has complained to the NFL, going all the way to Commissioner Roger Goodell to discuss. This week, Newton’s coach, Ron Rivera, echoed Ryan, saying it might be time to crack down harder.

Steelers defensive end Cam Heyward, the team’s union representative, says the players would appreciate more clarity.

”There’s so many gray lines. Everybody is always waiting for someone, or what Goodell is going to say,” Heyward said. ”If you have a set rule and a set amount and how it’s going to be addressed, I think you’ll see more clarity and you’re not going to have to deal with those (questionable hits).”

The NFL has resorted to a more-direct approach before.

In 2010, after a rash of helmet-to-helmet hits, the league made a midseason adjustment and put the possibility of suspension front and center in an emergency effort to halt the violence. Predictably, defensive players complained – then, after a week that included $175,000 in fines, nobody was suspended.

Since then, a total of 10 players have been suspended for illegal hits and other over-the-top physical play on the field, according to spotrac.com. Four of those suspensions, including Griffin’s, came in 2013. Another four have come over the past three seasons.

One observer believes player safety is only one of a multitude of issues the NFL has to consider when it decides which penalties to levy.

”As much as the league wants and needs to get rid of dirty plays and players, they don’t want to take actions that compromise, or even appear to compromise, the actual contests themselves,” said Doug Hartmann , a sociology professor at University of Minnesota, who teaches a course on sports in society. ”Fines and such, in other words, have much less impact on actual games and outcomes than suspensions or expulsions.”

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This story has been corrected to fix the name of the website, spotrac.com.

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AP Sports Writers Steve Reed in Charlotte, Will Graves in Pittsburgh and Mark Long in Jacksonville contributed to this report.

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The Kansas City Chiefs tight end was fined $24,309 by the NFL on Friday after he protested a non-call by mockingly chucking his towel toward an official and being ejected.

Kelce thought Jacksonville’s Prince Amukamara should have been called for pass interference in the end zone during the Chiefs’ 19-14 victory last Sunday when he grabbed his towel and made like it was a penalty flag. The official threw his hat in response, another official tossed a penalty flag on Kelce and the tight end was tossed from the game.

Chiefs teammate Daniel Sorensen was also fined $9,115 for a late hit out of bounds on Allen Robinson in that game.

Cleveland center Cam Erving and Dallas defensive end David Irving were each docked $9,115 for their tussle in the Cowboys’ 35-10 win. Irving punched Erving before getting his helmet ripped off.

Miami’s Andre Branch, San Francisco’s Quinton Patton and Los Angeles’ William Hayes were all fined $18,231 for horse-collar tackles.

Branch was called for a penalty after he took Jets wide receiver Brandon Marshall down for a 1-yard loss in the first quarter of the Dolphins’ 27-23 win. Also in that game, New York cornerback Buster Skrine was fined $9,115 for unnecessary roughness, as was defensive lineman Sheldon Richardson.

Patton’s penalty came when he tackled New Orleans linebacker Craig Robinson during an interception return that led to a touchdown in the Saints’ 41-23 win.

Hayes’ horse-collar tackle came in the fourth quarter of Los Angeles’ 13-10 loss to Carolina.

Detroit’s Johnson Bademosi and Green Bay’s Ty Montgomery were both fined $9,115 for roughing-the-kicker penalties in their games.

Also docked $9,115 were San Diego’s D.J. Fluker and Dexter McCoil for unnecessary roughness infractions against Tennessee, and Seattle’s George Fant for a clipping penalty against Buffalo.

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