Why the most obvious fix for the Chiefs’ offense is also the most simple
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- KC dropped at least 6 uncontested passes Sunday, costing estimated 10 points.
- Four of those drops ended possessions, sequence that matched game's 10-point margin.
- Restoring catching fundamentals would have added about 65 yards in key game.
The ominous indicator arrived 65 seconds after kickoff Sunday, in the form of the very first pass Patrick Mahomes released.
It wasn’t that the third-down throw fell incomplete.
It was why.
Mahomes hit a wide open Noah Gray in the hands, but Gray, standing beyond the first-down marker and prepared to give the Chiefs some momentum on their opening drive, just plain dropped it.
And so it began.
There are a lot of valid questions about the Chiefs’ offense in the aftermath of their 20-10 loss to the Texans — whether it be play design, play execution or play calls. I’ve explored some of those over the last couple of years, but most notably and recently the game-changing fourth-down call Sunday.
But there is a simple fix that would have prevented the lowest scoring output under Patrick Mahomes in more than two years:
Catch the dang ball.
The forthcoming exercise isn’t to excuse everything gone wrong. Instead, it began as an exploration to determine just how significant of a role the most basic of fundamentals played in the Chiefs shrinking to somewhere around a 10% chance of reaching the postseason.
The conclusion? You’d be hard-pressed to find a factor more significant, at least last week.
The NFL doesn’t officially track drops, but it’s pretty easy for us to do on our own. The Chiefs very clearly dropped at least six passes against the Texans, and that’s using a kind and conservative grading system.
It doesn’t include Tyquan Thornton’s chance to make a play in the end zone for what could have been a 48-yard touchdown, since Texans cornerback Kamari Lassiter pried that ball loose; and it doesn’t include Rashee Rice dropping an 8-yard pass before Texans safety Jalen Pitre de-cleated him. We could have included both, but these are just the uncontested drops that hit players in both hands.
There are still six of them.
“The obvious is we’ve had too many drops,” coach Andy Reid said. “You’ve got to take care of that. I’m not sure where these came from — we’d been catching the ball pretty good until the last couple of games.”
The quantity, sure, is glaring. The impact? Even more so.
• Travis Kelce turned a drop into an interception for the third time this season. He also dropped the ball on the previous play.
• Rashee Rice dropped a fourth-down catch that would’ve prolonged a fourth-quarter drive, with the Chiefs trailing by seven. (Among the 56 receivers targeted at least 50 times this year, Rice has the 13th highest drop rate at 9.8%, per PFF data.)
• Kareem Hunt found himself wide open on a third-down play design in the red zone, but he dropped the pass in the flat.
• Noah Gray dropped that initial third-down throw of the game, and then he failed to haul in another on first down. Both were uncovered.
Four of those six drops flat-out ended a Chiefs possession. So in a game that was either tied or played within one possession for the initial 14 1/2 minutes of the fourth quarter, the Chiefs gave away the football four times because of drops.
The combined expected points added (EPA) for those six plays, per the NFLfastR model: minus-10.3 points.
The final margin in the game: 10 points.
But the lingering questions a few days laster, as the Chiefs prepare to play the final month in win-and-need-some-help mode: What can you do about it? What should you do about it?
I’m not remotely attempting to absolve the offensive coaching staff of the difficult answers those inquires might prompt. It should prompt some self-evaluation in the offseason.
But there has to be a vexing element twisted into this topic: The six plays worked. They designed a receiver open and called it at the right time.
That description doesn’t account for Mahomes throwing 19 incompletions in only 33 attempts. But it does account for six of them.
If the Chiefs had caught those six passes, they would have generated at least 65 more yards in the game. While that’s not an official statistic, I’m being conservative on that grading, too, only minimally adding the most obvious yards after catch, and eliminating the possibility of even one broken tackle on any of the six.
So, if the Chiefs had gained those extra 65 yards on Sunday, they would have totaled the second most yards any team has gained against the Texans No. 1-ranked defense this season. They would have also totaled the second-best yards per play the Texans had allowed this season.
It’s all so fitting of a Chiefs season that has included some pretty good underlying offensive metrics that are instead washed away by their failure to execute in big moments.
For three months, it was figurative to say they’ve dropped the ball when it counts.
For two weeks, they’ve tacked on its literal meaning.