Why this is the most important adjustment Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes has made in 2022
On Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, the Chiefs implement the finer points of an offensive game plan, and somewhere during the session, the focus narrows to blitz routines.
And, well, that entails a bit of irony.
Because what no one says out loud, as they cycle through everything from a delayed linebacker rush to Cover-0, is something resembling a middle school kid trying to get out of his Algebra homework.
When am I ever going to need this?
To be sure, opposing teams have shown the blitz packages on film, plenty in some instances, but when it comes time to implement them against Patrick Mahomes, they suddenly get a little shy about pulling the trigger.
“Everyone seems to have,” offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy began, before breaking with a laugh, “a different outlook on how they’re going to prepare to play the Chiefs.”
Been that way since the beginning.
Almost.
This trend dates back to Week 2 of 2018, Mahomes’ first season as the franchise quarterback. The Chiefs traveled to Pittsburgh that day, and the Steelers decided to pressure the 22-year-old kid. Make him prove he could handle it, you know? They blitzed him 12 times that Sunday afternoon, and he responded with eight completions for 126 yards and two touchdowns, a 141.0 passer rating.
That was that.
Just one week later, the 49ers had seen enough. They blitzed Mahomes half the amount he saw seven days earlier, the start of a downward trend that has spanned this quarterback’s entire career. Year after year after year, Mahomes ranks in the very bottom tier of passers in terms of percentage of drop-backs in which he encounters extra rushers. A year ago, he saw blitzes at a 6% lower rate than any other quarterback in the league.
In this year’s season opener, for some inexplicable reason, the Cardinals decided it was a good idea to suddenly start blitzing Mahomes — only to find out that, oh, crud, he still fares quite well when you remove a defender from coverage. Since that game, though, Mahomes has been blitzed on just 17.93% of his drop-backs.
It is, once again, the lowest mark in football.
And thus, as some of his counterparts across the league allocate film to dissecting blitzes, Mahomes has been cornered into another adjustment.
The non-blitz.
It is quietly his best and most important modification of the year. Best? I’ll get to that shortly. Most important? As I just told you, this is a requirement on about 82.1% of his drop-backs.
Figuring out what to do when teams don’t blitz.
This is the strategy that made Mahomes look human last year. Teams reckoned that a gunslinger didn’t have much interest in shooting BBs, and there was truth to it. He wanted to take some chances, they figured. Show off the arm.
Week after week, Mahomes commented on the personal need to be more effective when extra defenders occupied the secondary, as though maybe he repeated it often enough, it would become muscle memory on game days. In an honest moment, though, when The Star sat down with him during this year’s training camp, Mahomes criticized his own play against crowded defensive backfields. The adjustment was more difficult than he had anticipated, he said.
Well after an offseason to think on it, Mahomes is back to looking like Mahomes again, and that’s in all situations. This was the talking point of last year, and that it has shifted into mere background noise is telling enough about where he stands.
A year ago, in non-blitz situations, Pro Football Focus gave Mahomes a 70.0 overall grade, which ranked 19th in the NFL. This year, they grade him at 83.4 when defenses don’t bring additional pressure, fourth in the NFL.
Within an offense that has garnered the spotlight for its personnel transformation, there has not been a more vital development than the offseason transformation — or tweak, I should say — from the guy running the show.
This is how defenses want to play him; they thought they figured out something to slowing him; and he’s in the midst of a run proving he’s stripped back the advantage.
The numbers are better virtually across the board, and all the numbers that follow come from Sports Info Solutions (SIS). When defenses send four rushers or fewer, Mahomes has a 1.9% better completion percentage than he did a year ago; he averages 1.3 more yards per attempt (a 19% increase), and he averages 36.1 more yards per game despite fewer attempts. His rating has jumped to 99.0 in those circumstances.
For the record, that’s a 99.0 rating in the situations in which defenses basically voted unanimously he was at his worst last season.
If you really want to get into the weeds on it, the data suggests he actually should have regressed over the first half of the year. Why? The competition is better. Mahomes has faced three-top defenses and four of the top-nine through eight weeks.
Yet he leads the league in yards and touchdowns; the Chiefs lead NFL at 30.4 points per game; and Mahomes is the odds-on favorite to win the Most Valuable Player award, per the sportsbooks.
Part of this, I should mention, is a credit to the cast of weapons with which the Chiefs have surrounded Mahomes.
Most of it, though, is his own adjustment. That’s as much mentally as any physical change.
Take his last game, for example. He threw the ball 68 times (dropped into the pocket 78), and the Titans blitzed on just five. His response? Pepper them with short throws. More than two-thirds of his attempts didn’t even travel 10 yards.
He still threw for 446 yards.
“I think I did a good job of doing what it took to stay patient, even (when) stuff wasn’t going out way, which is something I don’t know I could have done when I was younger in my career,” Mahomes said.
And in the past?
“I might have forced the issue a little bit more.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2022 at 5:40 AM.