Mellinger Minutes: A college rivalry returns (maybe), Reid’s decisions, Chiefs’ roster
There’s an old picture of my best friend from across the street and me. I’m guessing we’re 8 years old, hair the color of a banana, striped tube socks pulled high.
We are each holding a stack of what must’ve been 30 used plastic cups. I’m 100 percent sure my mom either didn’t know we were collecting strangers’ trash, or was dry heaving behind the camera. Maybe both.
This was at Memorial Stadium in Lawrence, for a Sunflower Showdown before I knew what that term meant. At least two things stick out about that picture.
First, there is not another human in the frame. The few who came left early, and the game — keep in mind I was obSESSED with sports as a kid — was apparently so terrible that my buddy and I chose to hoard garbage.
Second, we probably got in by buying a Sprite or something. At most a can of soup.
Those are the college football memories of my youth, and it’s why it took me until high school to get into the sport. I grew up in Kansas. College football stunk. It was boring. That’s what I knew.
For a long time, I’ve wondered whether another generation of kids will have a similar experience.
I always feel a little uneasy about K-State’s place in this conversation, and I hope you’ll let me explain.
The Wildcats have a good program. Bowl games in eight consecutive seasons before 2018. Moms and dads who grew up on Chad May and Michael Bishop are now raising kids who know K-State as a consistent winner.
But it’s just that the best part of college sports is the passion, and that passion is most obvious in rivalries.
Missouri is in the SEC now, and maybe the Border War is coming back in football at some point, but until then KU and K-State is the closest thing Kansas City has to a football rivalry.
You see where this is headed.
Les Miles is a long way from dragging Kansas football far enough to make this a real football rivalry again. His program was still pinanta’d by Coastal Carolina, and now has exactly seven conference wins in the last 11 seasons.
But it’s hard to remember a time that KU and K-State had even this much mutual interest. K-State is coming off a 48-41 win over No. 5 Oklahoma, one of the best regular season wins in program history (more on that later) and as clear a sign as we could possibly have at this point that Chris Klieman has staying power.
KU beat Texas Tech at the gun, a wild 37-34 win that added legitimacy to new offensive coordinator Brent Dearmon. At the very least, KU is riding a much welcomed wave of good vibes and positivity. At the most, the Jayhawks may have found a star in Dearmon and the foundation for a climb up to relevance.
I’ve long been skeptical that the state of Kansas — in terms of money and recruiting — can support two consistent FBS winners.
The timing of the Klieman and Miles hires always looked to me like the setup of a sort of Hunger Games, with Klieman taking a head start from K-State’s superior history and infrastructure.
This is the first time they’ll face each other, and it was always going to be interesting, but the timing of last week’s wins only raise the stakes.
I still think it’s unlikely that KU and K-State can have sustained and simultaneous success. But it’d be fun if this was the start of proving that theory wrong.
This week’s eating recommendation is the mega roast beef at Planet Sub, and the reading recommendation is Eric Moskowitz on How Baseball Cards Got Weird.
Please give me a follow on Twitter and Facebook and as always thanks for your help and thanks for reading.
I’m not sure what percentage of Chiefs fans are doom right now, and what percentage are like Vincent here. Either way, the team is in a weird spot.
Point: judging the 2019 Chiefs have always been about whether they can get to the Super Bowl, and the personnel healthy enough for the Packers game on Sunday is simply not good enough for the Super Bowl, so what is there to talk about?
Counterpoint: The linebackers are healthy, and they stunk.
Point: Patrick Mahomes is perhaps the most important player in the NFL, and with him the Chiefs might’ve beaten the Packers.
Counterpoint: Everybody has injuries, and Mahomes lost some games too, so lets chill on assuming the unicorn quarterback fixes everything.
I made this point in the game column but I believe it 100 percent so I’ll emphasize here: the Chiefs are so affected by injuries right now that it’s silly to make any definitive judgments, but the linebackers are healthy and showed how their inability to cover and stop the run simultaneously could be this team’s fatal flaw.
I guess I look at it like this. It’s hard to crush a team missing six starters (and two more at one point in the game) but every game is an opportunity and through poor execution and decisions they let one slip by.
Imagine the feeling if the Chiefs beat Aaron Rodgers with Matt Moore.
To me, the discussion about the injury has lost the plot.
Mahomes will play when he can. He’ll play when the doctors say he can. That’s the whole thing.
Look, I’d prefer to be a week too cautious on him than the other way around, and this is typically a four to six week injury that Mahomes may recover from in two, so it’s easy to wonder if they’re rushing him back.
But the Chiefs aren’t stupid. They know what they have. They know the consequences of mismanaging the reigning MVP. They have a good medical staff that acted swiftly, putting the kneecap back in place almost immediately, and they’ve actively solicited second and third and perhaps even more opinions.
They seem to be doing all the right things, in other words, so as interesting as some of the insight can be, the people with the most information and the most to lose through a mistake are the ones making the decision.
This isn’t a call for blind trust, and it’s true that the Chiefs — from Justin Houston to Eric Berry — have had some bizarre recovery timelines with some important players.
I just think it’s a weird place for any of us to have a concrete opinion about when he should return, other than expressing a desire to be cautious.
I hated that punt. I hated it in real time, I hated it after the game, and I hate it now.
I simply do not understand why so many football coaches are so slow to trust the well-distributed data. Football coaches and front offices spent countless hours and tons of money in an all-consuming search for every possible edge. Here is one right in front of them, explained a thousand ways, and with a few notable exceptions they hold onto ideas from the 1960s.
John Harbaugh, Doug Pederson and Bill Belichick seem to be the only coaches willing to follow the data. I am surprised that Reid hasn’t followed. Harbaugh and Pederson are former assistants under Reid, who is also close with Belichick.
Reid has built a career of challenging convention in many ways. He was going pass heavy long before that was a thing. His openness to concepts previously confined to colleges and high schools has literally helped change the way the NFL looks. He hired experts to help implement RPOs and some pistol concepts.
He brought four verts to Sundays, and has kicked off a million micro trends in play calling like sending running backs on vertical routes.
He self-scouts everything, and changes constantly. It’s among his best strengths.
I hope you read Vahe’s column on this. It’s predictably thoughtful and smart, and lays out a case I agree with completely.
I understand Reid’s side, other than the part about momentum, because the Packers had scored on three consecutive possessions. But he punt was downed at the 1, and he felt like the defense could get a stop and the offense would have another chance.
But to me that’s outdated thinking. The Chiefs’ best chance was with Aaron Rodgers off the field.
Maybe the chances of getting three yards there aren’t as high as I believe, or maybe Reid simply did not have a play he trusted in that situation. Maybe I’m giving Reid’s innovation and creativity too much credit. They went for it in a crucial spot against the Colts and didn’t get it.
So, maybe the Chiefs wouldn’t have converted. Maybe they would’ve handed the ball over with the Packers needing just five or so yards for a field goal. Maybe it didn’t matter.
But I think about it in these two other ways, too.
The Packers undoubtedly wanted the Chiefs to punt there, so that Rodgers could have the ball with the game on the line.
And if you’re going down, go down being aggressive.
Probably, and that has to be part of the calculus.
But the modern NFL is so tilted toward offenses, that has to be part of the calculus, too.
Mahomes or not, the Chiefs still have two good running backs, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce and Sammy Watkins.
I don’t know what the chances are of converting in that situation. Using Pro Football Reference’s awesome Play Finder tool we can know that teams have converted 40 of 75 fourth-and-3s with the score within a touchdown over the last five years.
That’s 53.3 percent. Even with Moore instead of Mahomes, I believe Reid’s talents would boost that percentage a bit in the Chiefs’ favor, but even if not that’s a higher percentage than I’d expect the Chiefs to be able to stop the Packers in that situation.
But, either way, your point is a smart one. Mahomes changes everything.
Yep.
It was, basically, wasting a timeout.
I don’t know the precise mechanics the Chiefs use for these decisions. Football games are chaos. Head coaches have a million decisions a minute. Every second matters and sometimes coaches appear to simply want things to slow down.
At least by the eye test, that’s what happened when Reid threw the challenge flag on the Packers’ first possession. Rodgers was rushing toward the line of scrimmage, forcing Reid to make a decision without the full information, and the Chiefs lost a timeout on a challenge that never really had a chance. Good job by the Packers.
Seemed like a similar situation with the timeout toward the end. Reid is in the middle of the chaos, worried about substitutions and game situations and a Hall of Fame quarterback on the other side and a thousand things I’m not even thinking of at the moment and he pulled the cord.
This might be naive, but I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the coach in that spot. Too many bullets flying.
Someone has to help him out. Again, I don’t know the precise mechanics of how the Chiefs handle decisions like that. A coach on the sideline or in the booth dedicated to specific situations might help.
You guys. It’s significantly better.
You mentioned the statistical improvement, and it’s worth emphasizing here. The Chiefs currently rank 17th in points against and 24th in yards after ranking 24th and 31st last year. The Chiefs were 31st in Football Outsiders’ DVOA last year, and entered Week 8 ranked 13th.
The Chiefs still generally stink against the run, but they’ve been much better against the pass. The biggest difference, to me, is the safeties.
That’s a subtle thing, and it doesn’t really jump out until you watch the tape. There were just so many instances last year where the cornerbacks were left exposed in disadvantageous matchups because of some combination of slow safeties or a poor scheme.
That isn’t happening nearly as often now, and the corners themselves have improved. Charvarius Ward is the most obvious example. You can see his confidence growing every week, his ball skills starting to develop, and his on-field impact showing up. Pro Football Focus currently has him 19th among all cornerbacks who’ve played at least half their team’s snaps.
The schemes have been more effective, too. The Chiefs have blitzed a season-high 15 times in each of the last two weeks, with a fair amount of stunts thrown in. Just my opinion here, but that’s a sign of growing mutual comfort between players and coaches and more confidence in the back end to cover.
Now, an obvious point: we don’t know how real any of this is. The Broncos were awful, and even if this is real the Chiefs will have to contend with the inevitable adjustments-to-adjustments phase of NFL life.
One more point. There is a huge difference between being better than last year’s defense, and being good enough for a Super Bowl.
The Chiefs have been too dependent on Mahomes’ outrageous talent. Winning nothing but shootouts is no way to a parade.
The defense was such a train wreck last year, and it seems as if some Chiefs fans have forgotten just how bad it was. They gave up about four points more a year ago, and were so terrible that the offense actually scored more in losses than in wins.
So the standard isn’t just improvement. The standard is enough improvement that the offense can be merely good instead of great and still get through a playoff game.
We’re a ways from that. But we’re closer than a year ago.
Here are two unpopular takes:
1. The 142.2 decibels thing is farcical, the reading taken at the end of a blowout of the Raiders when the stadium was at less than capacity, by a company motivated by the publicity and not wanting to waste a trip.
2. Arrowhead Stadium has long been vastly overrated as a homefield advantage. Andy Reid is 37-15 in the regular season at Arrowhead as the Chiefs’ head coach, and 33-19 on the road. This is not new information, either, based solely on three consecutive home losses. This has been true for years.
This can be an advantage, by the way.
Clark Hunt has repeatedly said that one of the things that appealed to him most about Reid was his ability to win on the road. The Chiefs don’t have to desperately chase playoff seeding.
Nobody wants to go Where The Phones Don’t Work in the postseason, but the Chiefs have won there. I’d take their chances at or near full strength in Foxborough over their chances without Mahomes at Arrowhead.
But, yeah. Mostly, the Chiefs’ homefield advantage has been oversold by persistent marketing and confirmation bias.
Sorry guys. But it’s true.
If the season ended today the Chiefs would have the No. 4 seed as the division winner with the worst record.
This doesn’t necessarily matter, because all division winners get a home game, but if the AFC was seeded simply by record and tiebreakers the Chiefs would be No. 6 — behind the Patriots (8-0), Colts (5-2 plus the tiebreaker), Ravens (5-2 but the Chiefs have the tiebreaker), Bills (5-2) and Texans (5-3 plus the tiebreaker).
If you play this out, let’s say the Chiefs lose to the Vikings next week, and then Mahomes is healthy for the last seven games.
That would be four losses in five games, but the team would be set up really nicely for the stretch run.
If they’re even remotely healthy — basically, if Mahomes is upright — the Chiefs would probably be favored in every game except the Patriots.
Lets assume the results are chalk. That would put the Chiefs at 11-5, but without the tiebreaker against the Patriots, Colts and Texans, and with the tiebreaker against the Ravens.
Their schedule is by far the easiest of the other contenders behind the Patriots.
The Ravens have games remaining against the Patriots, Texans, 49ers and Rams (on the road). The Colts have games at the Texans, at the Saints, and against the Titans, Jaguars and Panthers at home. The Texans are at the Jags, Ravens and Titans, and home against the Colts, Patriots and Titans.
I believe the Ravens are the best team in that group but would expect them to lose twice more. That would put them at 11-5, and behind the Chiefs based on the tiebreaker.
The Texans lost J.J. Watt for the season, a devastating loss for a defense built on pressuring the quarterback. The Chiefs would need at least three Texans losses, and you can find them on the schedule.
One quirk about playoff seeding might come into play depending on the result of the Texans-Ravens game in Baltimore on Nov. 17. If the Ravens win, they’d have the tiebreaker over the Texans, who would have the tiebreaker over the Chiefs, who would have the tiebreaker over the Ravens.
The NFL tiebreaker for three or more clubs in that situation is the division record. The Chiefs are already 2-0 in the division, without a true road game left (they play the Chargers in Mexico City) and reason to believe Mahomes will be healthy for all of them.
All of that is a long way of saying this: son-of-a-gun, despite it all, the Chiefs remain in decent position for the No. 2 seed and a first-round bye.
Maybe!
(Probably not)
But maybe!
They need some breaks. They need to be healthy, most obviously, and they need these nuggets of encouragement from the defense to turn into something real.
If Mahomes is healthy and the rest of the team is close to it, I’d take the Chiefs against anyone in the AFC other than the Patriots*.
*Though I don’t think the Chiefs want a rematch with the Ravens.
If Mahomes is healthy and the rest of the team is close to it, they have something like a heavy puncher’s chance in Foxborough.
So, I don’t know, maybe a 32.84 percent chance to win the AFC and then something like 50-50 if they get to the Super Bowl?
The search drags on, and I hope you saw Lynn’s update from Dayton Moore on the situation but I’m going to keep making the same point.
This is less about the Royals not knowing who they want, and it’s more about them knowing what they want the process to look like.
I would not be writing about Mike Matheny this often, or in this way, if I didn’t think it was a near lock that he would be the next manager.
He checks an awful lot of boxes for Moore. They share similar worldviews, and similar perspectives on baseball and its place. There are a load of questions about Matheny’s strategy and clubhouse management from his time in St. Louis, but he’s also been in the Royals’ organization for something like a year.
The interview process, then, is essentially 12 months old.
My columns and portions of the Minutes about Matheny have been less on whether he’ll be successful and more on who he is, how he might see the world, and why Moore sees a fit.
The reason for that: I don’t know Matheny. I’ve never spoken with him. I didn’t study him as the Cardinals manager, and even if I had, I wouldn’t know where his mind and heart have been since being fired.
I’m a firm believer in second chances, and that smart people who care about their craft can redefine themselves after learning from mistakes. I hope I’ve done that in my life, and have seen it far too often in others to not believe in the power.
Nothing is 100 percent. Todd Haley appears to be the same guy, for instance, despite being given a terrific second chance in Pittsburgh.
I’ve been pretty consistent on managers. I believe their importance and impact on win-loss records is vastly overstated by most. In fact, I’d rank it this way:
1. Players — they’re the ones who perform or don’t.
2. Front office and scouts — they’re the ones who choose the players.
3. Coaches — they’re the ones who help the players, both before they arrive in the majors and after.
4. Manager — his influence is most critical in maintaining a positive work atmosphere, but many others have a hand in that, too.
5. Whoever makes the tater tot nachos — mama those are good.
From what I can see, Matheny probably would not be my choice. I understand the desire to want a new voice, which is a significant knock against Pedro Grifol for this specific job, but I’d have thought hard about Clint Hurdle and gauged interest from someone like Raul Ibañez.
That said, Matheny is interesting. I’m looking forward to meeting him and talking to him and hearing his perspective now that he’s a season and a half removed from St. Louis. I’m curious how he approaches the job.
I don’t think the Royals’ future rests on the manager. But I do think the manager is as clear a window as we have into how an organization thinks and plans to win.
I ... don’t think so.
This season will almost certainly be a disappointment. Mizzou was set up in a way that 8-4 was generally the break-even point. The Tigers (finally) had a schedule that appeared to lean their way, and Kelly Bryant turned what otherwise would’ve been an uncertainty at best into a strength.
But to get there now the Tigers would have to win at Georgia next weekend or against Florida on Nov. 16. Tennessee is getting better every week, too.
A 7-5 finish would likely mean finishing the season with wins over Tennessee and Arkansas, and then playing in a bowl game.
To me, that’s not a fireable offense.
But if they lose the next three (we’re all assuming a win against crappy Arkansas) then anything is in play.
My hunch is that Odom would survive 6-6, disappointing as it would be, but I also know that bringing back a coach without a convincing track record and coming off a severely disappointing season at the moment the program is supposed to be taking off would be a tough sell.
There’s something strange going on with Odom. The history is full of losses or poor performances against teams Mizzou should handle, and as impressive as it is that his teams have consistently shown resiliency it’s also troubling that his teams are consistently in these spots where they need to show resiliency after bad losses.
This season is just such a missed opportunity. Mizzou is has enough talent that 8-0 right now should not have been impossible.
I’m not going back further than 10 years, because I’m not a psychopath, but here are the best wins by opponent’s ranking before K-State taking No. 5 Oklahoma down on Saturday:
- Mizzou vs. No. 3 Oklahoma in 2010
- K-State at No. 6 Oklahoma in 2012
- Mizzou at No. 7 Georgia in 2013
- K-State at No. 11 Oklahoma in 2014
- Mizzou at No. 13 Florida in 2018
- Mizzou at No. 13 South Carolina in 2014
- Mizzou over No. 13 Oklahoma State in the Cotton Bowl after the 2013 season
- Kansas vs. No. 15 Georgia Tech in 2010
- K-State vs. No. 15 Texas Tech in 2012
- K-State vs. No. 15 Baylor in 2011
A few thoughts. I was at that KU win. That was Turner Gill’s second game, after losing 6-3 to North Dakota State in the first. Going there with the idea of burying Gill with a column seemed like a good bet. I should’ve done it anyway.
Those 2012 wins for K-State set up what was essentially a national championship quarterfinal against Baylor. K-State entered that game ranked second in the country, needing wins against Baylor and Texas to play for a national championship (no Big 12 championship game in those days).
The Cats were beat up, especially in the secondary, but just got trucked in Waco 52-24.
Mizzou moved to No. 7 nationally with that win over Oklahoma. I was at that game, too, and remember Mizzou simply being the better team. A win put Mizzou on the inside track to a Big 12 championship, which would’ve likely meant a spot in the national championship.
So, anyway, I don’t think it’s dismissive of K-State’s win last weekend to suggest that the wins in 2012 and Mizzou’s win over Oklahoma in 2010 were bigger.
Those games set up those teams for a possible national championship.
Beating Oklahoma on Saturday — and that didn’t look like a fluke, either — is massive for Chris Klieman building a program but many steps remain to get where those other wins put those other teams.
Not anytime soon.
I know Sporting has taken some criticism for not supporting FC Kansas City more, and on some levels I get it. Sporting has positioned itself as the champion for local soccer, and maintaining such a tangible example for girls in the area would’ve been both on-brand and furthering the greater good.
But I also live in the real world, and know that Sporting’s leadership has a full plate trying to maintain that franchise’s growth. It’s a weird thing, but Sporting’s marketing and presentation has been so good that it’s often left people with this false impression that the team is making globs of money.
It’s not.
We don’t need to get into MLS economics here, but Sporting (like a lot of MLS clubs) is trying to walk a tightrope of operating like a big club in a league that’s still way behind in TV revenue and forces clubs to fly commercial on most trips.
In other words, I think most people would agree that a professional women’s team would be good for Kansas City in a lot of ways.
But it wasn’t making money, and Sporting remains a business.
The short answer: yes.
The longer answer:
Blaming the messenger when news is unfavorable is a time-honored tradition. Accusing a columnist of bias or agenda about an opinion that goes against a particular team is a move older than belly dancing.
It’s also true that there is more #content than ever before, so even without many outlets being stretched with personnel by definition there will be more misinformation than ever before.
Many outlets are staffed with fans, so people accustomed to that perspective — and I want to be clear: I think that’s great — are thrown off by columns written without it.
So the “Fake News” stamp is merely a convenient and branded way to dismiss unwelcome news or opinion.
I could write 5,000 words on this alone. There are so many misconceptions about The Media, and how the metaphorical sausage is made. This is probably truer in political reporting than sports, but it exists everywhere, this caricature that Media People are elitist or wealthy or lazy or all three.
There are exceptions in every part of life, of course, and the same way that some teachers or some police officers or some doctors are bad at their jobs the same can be said of some journalists.
But — and I know I’m biased here, but I also see this world intimately — the vast majority of sports media is the opposite of elitist or wealthy or lazy.
Elitist? We have never been more responsive or beholden to readers.
Wealthy? There’s a reason the jokes about sports writers at the pregame buffet are true.
Lazy? We’re not digging ditches, but the hours are long and unpredictable and if you’re not willing to work accordingly you probably aren’t going to last.
I’m probably getting away from your question a bit here. Yes, the vitriol of political coverage and discussion bleeds into our world.
The same way many on each extreme of the political spectrum believes political coverage leans away from them, many of the most passionate fans believe sports coverage is biased against their team. This is particularly true with college sports, by the way.
But it’s all part of the same ecosystem, at least on some level. People assume that because an editorial takes a certain stance that we’re all driven by that specific perspective. When deciding whether to subscribe for sports coverage, some will consider whether they agree with an editorial cartoon.
One thing that’s truer than ever. We all — whether we like it or not, and whether we intend to or not — become our own brands in a way. Even with more outlets moving toward subscription models it’s easy for readers to pick and choose specific writers or broadcasters. That creates a certain level of independence.
I hope to be clear on at least one thing here. It’s up to journalists both individually and collectively to present ourselves the right way. It’s not up to readers to sift through the b.s. and keep score. If there are negative opinions based on our work, that’s on us, and if there are negative opinions based on misperceptions that’s also on us.
So, I can be frustrated about whether someone decides to skip my stuff based on a syndicated column that ran in the editorial section, but I can’t control any of that.
What I can control is my effort and focus in writing columns worth your time, and doing the best I can with interactions both personal and online to make it clear that I appreciate the opportunity to do this for a living.
The “Fake News” accusations existed long before the term. It’s up to each of us to show readers that label doesn’t apply.
This week I’m particularly grateful for the Kansas City Symphony’s Petite Performances. We took the kids for the first time last weekend, and they both loved it. So cool to have them introduced to music that way, making it fun and personal. Plus, as an aside, a chunk of my mom’s career was spent putting on events like that for kids in the performing arts and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt closer to her.