How the Titans delivered the Chiefs a warning ... but also did them a favor
The Chiefs have a mostly new collection of talent surrounding the quarterback this year, which is not something you’re hearing for the first time, but midway into its introductory season, teams haven’t been quite sure what to do with it.
That tends to have a reverberation effect. Just this month, head coach Andy Reid, quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce each explained how it’s left the Chiefs wondering exactly what an opposing defense might do any given week.
Well, wonder no more.
The Chiefs beat the Titans 20-17 in an overtime game Sunday too ugly for primetime, but the visitors from Nashville delivered a bit of a blueprint, and you can bet the rest of the league will be doing their damnedest to produce its carbon copy.
The Titans nearly won in Arrowhead Stadium with a quarterback who completed five passes and a group of wide receivers who caught none. They won up front — dominated up front — and needed only four guys to do it. Rather than out-manning the Chiefs with speed at the line, they flat-out overpowered them in both the pass and the run game, coupling it with man-to-man coverage in the back end.
The result? They pressured Mahomes on 18 drop-backs in which they did not even send an extra rusher, the most such pressures Mahomes has faced in his career, per Next Gen Stats.
The Chiefs won an NFL game Sunday, which is never an easy task, but don’t get it twisted: They were terrible for the better part of three quarters, save a beautifully-written opening script. They weren’t even that much better in the fourth quarter, nor in overtime. They were just good enough, and lucky enough that Malik Willis was roaming the opposite sideline. The final stats will show 499 yards of offense, but it helps when you are permitted 13 offensive drives, because the opponent only once holds the football longer than 3:01.
This isn’t all negative, because the defense was rock solid, and there’s a value in winning games like this, lessons to be garnered, and you can’t play great football for 18 straight weeks. It just doesn’t happen. The Bills lost to the Jets earlier Sunday, and they remain the best team in football. The fact that you can still win when you have a night like the Chiefs just had is a positive.
“You gotta be able to win a game like that — where everything just isn’t perfect,” Reid said. “And your emotions are up and down. You gotta fight through that.”
Winning different types of ways is a requirement of a championship team, but the reality is if the Chiefs play that particular type of way again, they won’t win many others. Most teams, it turns out, have better production than Malik Willis at the quarterback position. And here’s a sentence I never expected to write: If the opponent Sunday had Ryan Tannehill, I’m probably writing about a different outcome.
Mahomes was forced into a career-high 68 pass attempts, and at times, it must’ve felt like he was out there all alone. He had 58 more rushing yards that anyone paid by the Chiefs to actually run the football for a living.
The running game is a long-lasting problem, enough that it’s time to see if a change in personnel, like Ronald Jones, can prompt a change in the production, too. The offensive line, a strength of this team a year ago after its makeover, is a legitimate question mark in Week 9, and that’s not solely because of just how bad they were as a group in Week 9.
But all of that showed up because the Titans’ game-plan, and because they had the personnel to execute it.
The Chiefs endured that offensive line makeover, in part, to counter-punch that sort of game-plan. The Titans are not the inventors of trying to pressure with strictly four, showing an immunity to sending extra rushers, but they are this year’s most extreme example. Nobody blitzes less often than they do. They did not send one blitz toward Patrick Mahomes in the entire first half and still sacked him twice.
That is not the last time the Chiefs will play a game like that because that is not the last time they will be forced to play a game like that. They will, most notably, see another when the weather is cold and the games tend to decide the mood of your offseasons.
To be sure, you have to have the personnel to pull off what the Titans did — and not many teams can match the front four the Titans provide, particularly when you consider their depth. But some do, and those are the teams that tend to still be playing in late January.
Playoff-like atmosphere is a phrase we hear frequently. The Titans provided a playoff-like scheme, the depths of which will become even more noticeable as the best football minds inside the Chiefs’ facility pore through the film.
But they won’t be the only ones. The Bills have the guys to replicate it. The Bengals, too.
Why wouldn’t they try?
And that’s where the Titans unwittingly did the Chiefs a favor.
If they unleashed something of a defensive road map, it might be public now, but the Chiefs have access to those records, too.
Sure, teams will mix up coverages, same as they did a year ago when the deep shells were all the rage, but there is a foundation: Pressure with four — and if those rushers can stay in their lanes to prevent scrambling, even better — and man-to-man coverage. So long as you’ve got the horses to do it.
A year ago, it was those pesky cover-2 shells. But you know, the Chiefs actually solved those looks — it was a misconception they did not — but that’s probably because they saw so dang much of them.
Now, more than ever since the departure of Tyreek Hill and the acquisition of Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster, the Chiefs have a pretty good idea of what they might see when the games matter most.
And with a two-month head start.
This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 5:30 AM.