The solution to the KC Chiefs’ offense? Catch the dang ball. Here’s how bad it’s become
An offense that features Patrick Mahomes throwing the football and Andy Reid calling the plays is ordinary.
That’s a sentence that has literally never been true ... until this season. More than mere opinion, it’s statistically backed fact now — the Chiefs have managed more than two touchdowns only once in their past six games.
But Reid is long past the what of this perplexing development and on to a different question: Why?
To pinpoint that answer, he gathers intel from coaches, players, film, all of it. The study has returned him to a common spot.
What if they could just catch the dang ball?
This is not purely wonderment, nor is it a thought conceived out of frustration. Rather, it’s one the Chiefs must actually attempt to answer. Because they don’t want to reinvent the wheel on offense if simply catching the football would prompt it to roll along smoothly.
“We try to evaluate everything the best we can without hiding anything,” Reid said. “We try to do it from a real standpoint. ...
“Everybody is saying the right things. We’ve just got to take care of business.”
And yet here we are, having a conversation about something that has plagued the Chiefs since a Week 3 pass hit Marcus Kemp in the hands and popped into the air for an interception. Thirty of Mahomes’ passes have been dropped by their intended targets, the most in the NFL, per Next Gen Stats.
Last Sunday, a yearlong trend reached its peak. Five drops. One football clipped the fingers of receiver Tyreek Hill and fell into the lap of Broncos cornerback Pat Surtain II for an interception. The scoreboard remained unaltered. But the expected score changed significantly. That one drop resulted in nearly a 4 1/2-point swing, using expected points data from Pro Football Reference.
It’s not the first time, either, or this conversation would be unnecessary. After all, the Chiefs beat the Broncos. What’s the problem here?
Well, for one thing, it’s constant. Six of Mahomes’ 12 interceptions have hit one of his own receivers first. Six have had a 75% chance or better of being completed, Next Gen Stats says. That’s twice as many as his first three years ... combined.
This isn’t all about Mahomes’ bad luck, though — or a reversal of the good fortune he experienced in that category over the past two years. It’s about the biggest hiccup in the Chiefs’ offense.
Drops.
The interceptions — the nature of the interceptions, we should say — just tells the fuller story. With the Chiefs, the quantity is alarming. So too is the quality.
The aforementioned Kemp play — which came on the opening drive — cost the Chiefs more than three expected points. A ball that hit tight end Travis Kelce before being intercepted amounted to a 5-point swing against Dallas. The list goes on.
Mahomes wants to take blame for some of this because, frankly, that’s what Mahomes tends to do. The passes were just a touch off, he’ll tell you.
“Some of the dropped passes, people get hung up on them — even the one in the (Broncos) game that got intercepted, if I throw the ball in a better spot and he makes the catch, he probably splits and scores,” Mahomes said. “I threw it high and hard, and it gets tipped up and picked. People put it on him, but really it’s on me to make a better throw.
“For myself, just try to make better throws and let those guys have easier catches, especially in traffic where they can make plays happen after the catch.”
These are professional receivers, and really good ones at that. Hill and Kelce are perennial All-Pro selections, and they have been two of the unlikely culprits.
Kelce (10 drops) and Hill (seven) rank second and third, respectively, in terms of the impact of their dropped passes, trailing only Cincinnati rookie Jamar Chase, according to data from Sportradar and NFLfastR, compiled by Anthony Reinhard. Kelce and Hill have combined to cost the Chiefs nearly 45 points this season in expected points lost.
That’s, uh, pretty staggering.
“It’s not like we’re going to stop throwing (them) the football,” Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy said. “Things happen in this league, and unfortunately it seems like we’re going through a whirlwind of things that have taken place. But the thing I appreciate about our guys is that they have found a way to overcome the adversity and stick through it together.”
To a certain extent, that’s true. The Chiefs are scoring 19.7 points per game over the past six weeks. But that figure, if stretched over the entire season, would place them in the bottom half of the league.
There’s more to the offense’s uncharacteristic play. No, Mahomes has not played as well as he did from 2018-20, though the percentage of his throws that are deemed turnover-worthy by Pro Football Focus actually falls under his career average (2.8% this season, 2.9% for his career). This, in a season in which he has more interceptions than the previous two years combined.
And, yes, absolutely, defenses are playing the Chiefs differently. This is one of the concepts behind those deep shells that make the Chiefs dink-and-dunk their way down field — more plays mean more opportunities for a mistake.
But the Chiefs are unable to even declare with certainty if they’ve solved those shells — at least until they catch the football with consistency. Maybe they have. Maybe they haven’t. The evidence points toward the drops being the most debilitating element of their offense, even if they’re not the only reason for its lack of stability.
When Bieniemy mentions the Chiefs must create their own luck, this is a good reference point. When he says the Chiefs have been their own worst enemy, again, look no further. When Reid talks about returning to fundamentals, here you go.
Is fixing the drops alone enough to fix their offense? Who knows? But the Chiefs would love to find out.
And perhaps they will.
“These guys make plays, so I’m going to keep throwing the football to them,” Mahomes said. “They’re going to go out there and make plays happen. And if (a drop) happens, it happens, and we’ll move on to the next play.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.