Patrick Mahomes considers this his top priority. It fits the Chiefs’ draft picks
The Super Bowl went bad in a hurry, so overwhelmingly one-sided that it’s difficult to pinpoint even a single play of consequence after the halftime show.
But here goes.
With the game out of hand in the fourth quarter, the Chiefs sent two receivers streaking down the field: Hollywood Brown and Xavier Worthy. Neither created much separation, but the Chiefs trailed the Eagles by 28 points, so Patrick Mahomes reared back to unleash it anyway.
Well, he tried.
Instead, Philadelphia defensive lineman Milton Williams sacked the Chiefs quarterback, forcing a fumble and then recovering it for a turnover.
“I was just going to put it up and let him run,” Mahomes told his offensive coordinator, Matt Nagy, on the sideline after the play, as captured by the team’s cameras. “I was putting it out there.”
His words provided the rationale on a play gone awry.
They ought to provide the mentality for what comes next.
While the outcome buried its relevance, Mahomes kept firing in that Super Bowl fourth quarter. And, wouldn’t you know it, he even hit some downfield shots.
Finally.
His yardage on three downfield completions totaled more than he had in any game all season.
The Chiefs were atrocious throwing the ball behind the coverage last year, and that’s after it drew the focus of their previous offseason. Whatever you think your eyes told you, the numbers were even worse.
Last week, as he began workouts with teammates in Texas, Mahomes took responsibility for it. He considers it his priority for 2025. But there’s another element that needs to come into play, the part that’s much less in his control:
He needs time.
The Chiefs poured more resources into their offensive line in free agency and the draft than any other position group. They handed tackle Jaylon Moore their most expensive free-agent contract and still drafted Ohio State left tackle Josh Simmons in the first round.
The injury history with Simmons represents a risk.
The recent history in Kansas City represents the risk’s worth.
The Chiefs have to better protect the parts of a pass rush that Mahomes cannot see. He took more sacks last season (36) than any year of his career, and it wasn’t particularly close. He was sacked on 5.83% of his dropbacks. That number had never been higher than 4.33%.
It’s not just about sacks. It’s about the mere threat of them.
Ongoing uncertainty at left tackle prompted the Chiefs last year to modify their passing game. In effect, they opted to limit their own ceiling for the sake of keeping the quarterback upright, and anyone who had witnessed the previous two months no doubt nodded along.
The idealism of a deep passing game took a backseat to short, quick throws — the idea being that this approach would help negate the effect of asking a left guard to play left tackle.
That’s what the next blindside protector — Simmons, Moore, whomever it might be — has to change.
Allow the Chiefs to re-open the playbook.
Mahomes threw the ball 20-plus yards past the line of scrimmage on only 7.8% of his attempts in 2024, according to PFF data. That ranked dead last among 26 quarterbacks with enough attempts to qualify.
Oh, and he completed only 26.1% of those throws, which ranked 25th of the 26.
A year earlier, in 2023, we blamed the wide receivers for the Chiefs’ ineffectiveness downfield. And we weren’t wrong about that — they dropped more deep passes than any other unit in football.
But in 2024 there was no picturesque, perfectly placed deep pass dropped by Marquez Valdes-Scantling on national TV. In fact, there were no drops at all. Zero.
The blame falls elsewhere.
To a quarterback who sometimes failed to throw accurately.
And to an offensive line that failed to give him the chance.
“There were opportunities in games for deep shots that I either didn’t take or we missed barely,” Mahomes said, and the clearest example comes in a string of misses to rookie Xavier Worthy. “I think if we can get back to hitting some of those throws — we preached about this last offseason — it opens up the rest of the offense.
“You want to get that back.”
He paused ever so slightly before adding another thought, and it revealed less about his team’s plans and more about how opponents have started to view the Chiefs.
“Defenses are starting to creep up a little bit more and force us to get back to the deep throws,” he said. “We have to be versatile enough to be able to do both — hit the deep shots and hit the underneath stuff. And that’s when we’ll be at our best.”
For a half-decade, we’ve talked about defenses staying back, too concerned with how the Chiefs could beat them deep.
Creeping up? That’s a change, and it came with good reason. It’s not that teams think the Chiefs can’t hit the deep shot. They know they can hardly afford to try. (Opponents have access to that 7.8% number, too.)
In his last four regular-season games, as the Chiefs moved Joe Thuney to left tackle, Mahomes completed just one of 15 downfield throws.
The statistics are officially assigned to the quarterback, but they overlook a key aspect in those 15 attempts: Mahomes had pressure in his face on eight of them. That’s the highest rate of pressure on downfield throws for any full-time quarterback in December.
A lot of things failed to marry the offseason objective with the in-season reality.
Mahomes is right that he has to lead the solution this offseason. A year ago, he talked about cutting off half the field pre-snap based on the coverage looks. Well, a quarterback with that arm should have the confidence to use it more frequently, pre-snap coverage be damned.
A mentality adjustment — his own — certainly needs to be part of the response.
Having Rashee Rice back as an underneath weapon could provide some openings on the back end. Maybe Jalen Royals can, too, as a rookie. That’s the idea anyway.
But none of that matters — Mahomes, his receivers, the scheme, none of it — if there’s no time to operate.
If a new left tackle can’t protect.
That retreats all the way back to Mahomes’ first Super Bowl, one of the three he did win. In a spot of fourth-quarter desperation, he walked to the sideline and asked his offensive coordinator about a specific play that now ranks among the most famous in franchise history.
Before he just outright called the play himself, Mahomes first had to check something.
“Do we have time,” he began the question, “to run Wasp?
Time.
It’s been six years since he asked that question. And time remains part of the equation. It’s always part of the equation.
They didn’t have it a year ago.
The Chiefs need a left tackle — Simmons or Moore — to reply with a different answer now.