How Patrick Mahomes called his shot to deliver the Chiefs a win vs. the Chargers
The clincher for the ninth straight AFC West championship ended with a doink.
It began with a conversation.
It began, more specifically, with a quarterback calling his shot.
Patrick Mahomes walked to the sideline at the two-minute warning Sunday, the Chiefs trailing the Chargers by one but squarely in field goal range and facing a third down that could ice the game.
It was there, in a talk between Mahomes, head coach Andy Reid and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, that they initially debated whether to hand the ball off and drain the clock or absorb the risk of a throw that could fall incomplete. A quarterback rollout, they ultimately decided, would leave both options in play.
That’s when Mahomes interrupted.
“I’ll make something happen,” he said.
The story of his career.
The story of this Chiefs season.
The Chiefs toiled through about, oh, 59 minutes Sunday before edging the Chargers 19-17 to clinch the AFC West — a win that came with a kiss off the upright on Matthew Wright’s 31-yard field goal as time expired.
Let’s be clear. The Chiefs were offensively inept for most of the night; they, keeping with a season theme, took the third quarter off; they were out-manned at the line of scrimmage. And, by night’s end, they drastically improved their Super Bowl path by beating a good football team.
Ultimately, after the sideline discussion, Reid’s play-call was a naked play-action rollout. See, the Chargers had run man-to-man defense for most of the night. On third downs, they had invoked a strategy few dare to try against Mahomes: They brought the house. They played downhill. They were aggressive.
A naked play-action is essentially designed to take advantage of that aggression — to allow the blitzers to freely sprint into the backfield while you’re out on the perimeter with space to run.
It tricks ‘em.
And ...
“If they would’ve done that,” Reid quipped after the game, “it would’ve been a great call.”
Instead, the Chargers stayed home. No blitz. No man-to-man defense. When Mahomes rolled right — naked, without a blocker in front — the nearest four players were all wearing white tops and yellow pants.
What now?
Mahomes had pre-planned for the possibility: Just slide down inbounds and keep the clock rolling to leave the Chargers’ offense less time to answer with a field goal of their own. But at the last split-second, after shedding one tackle, he peeked up and spotted something.
“I just saw 8-7 just sitting right there in the middle of the field open,” he said.
In the second half Sunday, tight end Travis Kelce — that would be No. 87 — became the fastest tight end in NFL history to reach 12,000 career receiving yards.
Yards 12,001-12,010 all but clinched a game.
All but clinched this team’s 12-1 record.
After spotting Kelce sitting in an opening in the zone, Mahomes flicked him a pass. It went for nine yards and a first down. It ensured that when Wright kicked a football off the upright and then through the uprights, the clock showed zeroes.
“That’s not quite the way it was drawn up,” Reid said.
“Trav just played ball and got himself open,” Mahomes said.
Ah, yes. That’s the other piece of this. Kelce had actually been assigned to run a corner route on the play.
He “improvised,” he termed it.
“It is what it is,” Mahomes said with a smirk.
It’s one more exampling of two guys — how’d he phrase it? — making something happen.
Just as he’d predicted.
Just as the Chiefs have done all season.
It’s yet another game — the sixth this season — in which the Chiefs’ win probability dipped below 50% in the final four minutes before they won the game anyway. That should be impossible. It nearly is — a 1 in 500 chance, if you total them together.
For another Monday, you can’t ignore how poorly the Chiefs played over the middle quarters. The offense was a hard watch. It’s the eighth time this season the Chiefs have totaled less than 4.98 yards per play. In 2018, for reference, they didn’t do that once.
But their record this year in those eight games? You guessed it: 8-0.
The rest of the league is 41-95, a winning percentage of 30.1%. The Chiefs, one of 32 teams, account for 16.3% of those wins.
The advanced metrics don’t care for this team. They just keep expecting the Chiefs to lose. And for 59 minutes, it looks like, you know what, they just might.
Then Mahomes happens. Or a blocked field happens. Or a toe out of bounds happens. Or, well, we are running out of space to list them all anymore.
The point is the Chiefs didn’t play particularly great football Sunday. Nor have they been playing particularly great football for awhile now.
The bigger point is that they won anyway.
This might seem a bit out of left field, but stick with it: The Bills were at 8.24 yards per play earlier Sunday afternoon while playing the other team from Los Angeles. There, against the Rams, Josh Allen became the first quarterback in NFL history to throw for three touchdowns and run for three touchdowns in the same game.
The Bills sure look like the team to beat, don’t they?
Well, they were beat. They played beautifully and lost to the Rams.
The Chiefs played ugly and won.
It would be foolish to consider that irrelevant — you’d like to be building toward improvement in mid-December. The playoffs are just a month away, after all.
But at the end of the night, as hard as the Chiefs tend to make everything look, there was one thing that became mathematically easier:
Their path to the Super Bowl.
The path that, for five years now, has started with the two guys who ended things Sunday.
This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 5:30 AM.