There’s a new trend to slow Patrick Mahomes. Don’t we go through this every year?
The most human 30 minutes of Patrick Mahomes’ professional life came nearly two years ago inside Arrowhead Stadium. In the AFC Championship Game, the Patriots limited him to just four completions, allowed him all of 65 yards through the air and shut him down for a half.
For a half. Mahomes threw for 230 yards and three touchdowns in the second half and sent the game to overtime, albeit an eventual loss.
Afterward, he described the Patriots’ defensive scheme as something “not a lot of teams have (played against us) this year.” Yet it required only the halftime intermission to figure something out. The Patriots played “nothing different” after the break, Mahomes said, but rather the Chiefs found a solution for it.
Which brings us to today.
That cold January night in 2019 serves as the microcosm for the evolution of Patrick Mahomes. As a microcosm of his own mastery. And as a microcosm of defensive coordinators trying anything to slow this man down.
“The definition of a great quarterback to me,” said Broncos coach Vic Fangio, “is that there’s no one way to play them.”
The Patriots thought maybe they had tapped into something that day, and in all of 15 real-time minutes, Mahomes, Chiefs coach Andy Reid and his assistants found the response — against a coach many consider the best defensive mind to ever do it, no less.
It’s just one revolution in a never-ending cycle. The first three seasons of Mahomes’ career have been defined by defensive experimentation, followed by game plans thrown in the garbage. Again and again.
“It kind of just goes in different phases,” Mahomes said, “if you look through my career, at least.”
There’s a trend developing on how to best try to defend this year’s Chiefs. Take away the deep stuff by dropping back the safeties and linebackers back. Let Mahomes have everything underneath.
But that’s all it is for now — a trend.
There have been many. And each year, if it works for about thislong, some wonder if a team has finally figured out something, anything to slow — not stop, but slow — the Mahomes-led offense.
They used to blitz Mahomes, you know. When he was a first-year starter, they anticipated he’d be wide-eyed. They wanted to force quick decisions. So they brought pressure with numbers.
Didn’t last long. Come to find out, Mahomes produced a better quarterback rating when facing the blitz than without them. So, today, only one team in the NFL sees blitzes less often than the Chiefs do.
They’ve tried zone. They’ve tried press coverage. Remember last season, when a couple of teams beat the Chiefs with man-to-man coverage? Someone had finally figured something out, right?
“Especially the beginning of my career, there was a lot of zone coverage, and then it became a lot of pressure – pressure on me and trying to get the ball out of my hands to see if I could pick it up,” Mahomes said. “Last year, it started off with zone, then became a lot of press and man coverage. And this year, it’s kind of been deeper zones and not letting us get free releases off the ball but still playing that zone coverage.”
If there’s one consistency within the constantly-changing strategies, it’s that opposing teams seem willing to completely bail on their usual schemes when they play the Chiefs. The theme of today is the deep shell. On Monday in Buffalo, safeties and linebackers dropped so deep that Mahomes said it reminded him of his days at Texas Tech, leading the Air Raid offense.
The Chiefs have seen plenty of that this season. It’s the new thing. As a result, Mahomes’ yards-per-attempt is down to 7.8 after years of 8.3 (2019) and 8.8 (2020). His yards-per-game is down. The Chiefs are tallying explosive plays at a lower rate than either of his first two seasons as a starter, when they were the league’s best in that area.
And yet they’re still second in football in total offense. They’re 5-1, and they scored 32 points in the only game they lost.
“You can’t go pressure heavy (but) you can’t just void yourself of pressure. You can’t play all man (but) you can’t play all zone,” Fangio said. “You’ve got to mix it up because the great quarterbacks are too good, and this quarterback is definitely great.
“There’s no one way to play them or people would have tried. And you’ve seen the scores. Nobody has broken that code yet.”
They keep trying. Keep experimenting. This new scheme of making Mahomes beat you with underneath stuff? Well, he’s beating teams with the underneath stuff.
And he’s proven willing to step back and let the running game do the work. A week ago, he reminded himself before run-pass option plays to just hand the ball off, to forget about even trying to pass against a defense determined to take it away.
The Chiefs finished with 245 rush yards, the most in Reid’s tenure. They dominated time of possession. They beat a 4-1 team on the road in a game that didn’t feel as close as the 26-17 final indicated.
The only thing absent in the equation are the 400-yard, four-touchdown passing days.
“I don’t care,” Mahomes said.
“I don’t think he worries about all that,” Reid said. “He’s OK if the run game works. As long as we’re winning, he’s real good with that. And he’s still going to end up with — as long as everything works out the way it’s been going — he’ll end up with the numbers. That takes place, and most of all, it helps us win games. So I would tell you he just keeps doing what he’s doing, and he’ll be fine. But he’s got a great attitude about it.”
After all, he should have learned a lesson from the history of these trends.
This one’s probably only temporary.
This story was originally published October 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.