Gaither, who was awarded the injured Stewart Bradley's position just before the season, didn't view it as a threat.
"If you can let it motivate you, you can let it de-motivate you, in a way," Gaither said. "So I don't worry about it. I've been around long enough to know that anything can happen for any reason. It's not my job to decipher why."
The knock against the 6-foot-2, 235-pound Gaither is that he's not big or physical enough to play the run. Trotter specialized in that area. But Gaither was part of a unit that held the bruising Larry Johnson (19 carries for 38 yards) to one of his worst outings and the Chiefs to just 3.4 yards a carry yesterday.
"The main thing we needed to do was we needed to take [Johnson] out of the game," safety Quintin Mikell said. "That was our focus all week - kind of make them one dimensional."
Kansas City, in effect, had a lot to do with its one-dimensionality. Rather than take to the air after the Eagles rendered the run game useless, the Chiefs kept the ball on the ground.
"Honestly, I was surprised a little bit," Gaither said. "They run the ball a lot, but they ran the ball much more than I thought they would with the score being what it was."
Nevertheless, the Eagles' defense was more aggressive, even if it was preying on a team that has now lost 26 of its last 28 games. Last week, defensive coordinator Sean McDermott chose not to blitz Drew Brees much, fearing the quarterback's three-step drop-and-release would waste the extra rushers. But Brees picked apart a passive secondary, which in turn opened up lanes for a run game that tallied 133 yards.
"Everyone in there today, I guarantee you, was still thinking about what happened last week," Mikell said. "We don't want that to happen again, so we had to go out there and . . . get our swagger back."
