Mellinger Minutes: KC Chiefs’ loss, CEH fumble, Mahomes INT, Chris Jones vs. run + MORE
The Chiefs lost on the NFL’s biggest regular-season stage, and they did it in unforgettable ways, particularly with a fumble at the end in a situation where the Chiefs probably could have knelt three times and kicked a game-winning field goal.
But if you’re focused entirely on Clyde Edwards-Helaire, you’re missing the story.
And if anyone with the Chiefs believes that was a flukey outcome, they’re missing the truth.
The Chiefs remain the AFC’s best team. Believe that. They are talented enough — not just the quarterback, but the top of the roster around him — to win a lot of games even with mistakes. We’ve seen this. Their margin for error is bigger than anyone else’s.
But it’s been years since the goal for this team was to win a bunch of games.
The goal for this team is — and should be — to win the Super Bowl.
A year ago, the Chiefs fell into a trap of human tendency. They had just won the Super Bowl and wore Run It Back T-shirts and were favored in every game and were the NFL’s rock stars. They developed a habit — do just enough to win.
Sometimes that was to sort of sleepwalk through the first half and then win late — the Chargers game in L.A. comes to mind.
Sometimes that was to build a big lead and then hold off a comeback — the Dolphins game.
The thing worked, if we’re honest, because the starters went 14-1. The Chiefs secured the AFC’s only first-round bye in time to rest their best players in Week 17. That’s pretty wild in a league built on parity.
There is no way to prove this, but I believe the Chiefs would have won last year’s Super Bowl with its starting offensive line. We know what happened instead, not just in that game but in the offseason.
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was intentional over the summer, too. That 20-0 line was not off the cuff. He knew he would say that at some point, and the motivation was not to chase Mercury Morris but to set a tone early and clearly that the Chiefs needed to focus on winning every practice, every meeting, every snap, every game.
That process was never going to be perfect, but it’s obvious the Chiefs have a lot of work to do.
The loss is not the end of the world. This is not time for a freakout. The Chiefs lost one game, on the road, to one of the AFC’s best teams. They lost by one point, and until a late fumble appeared in position to win.
They did this despite the first truly dumb play of Mahomes’ career, a complete inability to stop the run, against an opponent that was always going to play this one especially hard — it was the Ravens’ first game with fans since 2019, and they had a productive sort of desperation after losing a bad one to the Raiders in the opener.
So we should keep all of this in perspective. Don’t be delusional — the Chiefs don’t have the right to beat everyone by 14.
But we also know the standards are unforgiving. Two years ago, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl and Tyreek Hill predicted seven rings. Last year, they lost the Super Bowl and general manager Brett Veach said it felt like the Chiefs were the worst team in the world.
This can be a step toward another championship.
But it has to be handled the right way.
This week’s eating recommendation is the wings at Waldo Thai, and the reading recommendation is Diana Moskovitz with the story of Courtney Smith, the ex-wife of former Ohio State assistant coach Zach Smith, and the victim of his abuse.
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I hear you, and there are a thousand reasons Chiefs fans are making that face this week. We’ll get to them here, including the obvious ones, but right now I keep thinking about this sequence at the end of the first half.
The Chiefs took a 7-point lead with less than a minute left in the half, and after consecutive penalties the Ravens were snapping the ball with 1st and 25 from their own 21 with 40 seconds left and just one timeout.
Let’s emphasize that situation — first-and-forever, 79 yards to the end zone, just 40 seconds and one timeout.
There should not be a situation in this world where the Ravens score.
The Ravens probably would have been content to go in with the score unchanged, but they had nothing to lose so they called a run and this happened:
Which is worse: that the first defender with a chance at the tackle is 9 yards downfield, or that he whiffs and the next chance is another 8 yards or so downfield, or that even after a group of Chiefs have their hands on the man he still gets another 4 or 5 yards?
Actually, wait. Don’t answer that yet.
Because the answer might be all the missed tackles on this run by Lamar Jackson, which put the Ravens in field goal range to steal 3 points before halftime:
You never know the butterfly effect that one play can have on the rest of a football game, but that’s three points the Chiefs had no business giving up and they lost by one.
Yes, of course, maybe the Ravens don’t go for two a few times in the second half, but if that means the game would be tied instead of over at the end of regulation then we’re still talking about a pretty big deal.
The Chiefs deserved to lose this game. We’ll get to Edwards-Helaire’s fumble, and I’m not delaying it here to excuse it. He made an awful mistake at the worst time. I’m delaying it to make sure we don’t excuse everything else the Chiefs did wrong.
This is a feature of being a sports fan, not a flaw, but even following this stuff my entire life it’s still wild how quickly the moods can change.
At some point in the third quarter, Willie Gay Jr tweeted (and quickly deleted) that the Chiefs were going undefeated. At another point my friend BJ Kissel was asking if anyone could remember when the Ravens had the momentum.
This is not unique to the NFL, because college football is a thing that exists. This is not unique to football, because in July 2014 a lot of you wanted Ned Yost fired and the Royals blown up. This is not even unique to America, because the Premiere League takes a back seat to nobody when it comes to overreactions.
It’s just a really interesting thing, especially because I think that for most of us we know they’re overreactions even as we’re making them. It’s like we just don’t care, or just want to vent, or whatever. There is at least a smidge of endorphins involved.
But, yeah, if the Chiefs lose at home to the Chargers we’ll be talking about bigger problems.
I do not think the Chiefs will lose at home to the Chargers.
The Chiefs have problems to fix. We all knew that before Sunday night. Seeing the problems exploited is an uncomfortable experience, but sometimes the truth hurts.
I hear you, and I know a lot of you feel this way. This might be splitting hairs a bit, but I’m going try anyway:
The Chiefs were playing for the field goal there, which is a defensible strategy, and if that’s the strategy then handing the ball off when you’re in field goal range with 86 seconds left and your opponent down to one timeout is sensible.
The Chiefs had thrown the ball three times in a row, so it’s not like they were ignoring the pass. You’ve heard by now a million times that Edwards-Helaire had never fumbled as a professional before, but it’s also true that he’d only fumbled twice in 479 touches in college. There was no reason to worry about him fumbling there.
So, my criticism isn’t about giving the ball to Edwards-Helaire.
My criticism is about playing for the field goal there.
Harrison Butker is a stud. He trails Justin Tucker by 0.3 percentage points as the most accurate kicker in league history, and the Chargers coming up is a reminder that he essentially won that game in L.A. last year.
But you can still go for the touchdown knowing your backup plan is a game-winning field goal attempt.
That’s the part I don’t get. Mahomes threw the rotten interception, but he’s shown in his career that he makes the right decisions and stays on the right side of the risk-reward calculus.
That’s the part I don’t fully understand.
You can give it to Edwards-Helaire there. But not as a plan to kick a field goal.
I’ve heard this in a few places, but this fumble is not on Joe Thuney.
The defender gets through, but even if we ignore that Thuney went inside to block first and was just coming out to chip the outside rusher — let’s even assume Thuney got his assignment wrong, just for conversation’s sake — Edwards-Helaire has no business holding the football like this:
Andy Reid wondered after the game whether the problem was in the exchange, and whether Edwards-Helaire ever had the ball fully grasped. Chiefs PR did not make Edwards-Helaire available, so we’ll have to wait until at least Wednesday to hear from him about the play.
But in that video there is no obvious problem with the exchange. It looks to me like Edwards-Helaire let the ball get a little to vertical, and didn’t keep it tucked tight enough, particularly when considering the circumstances.
So for me that’s not on Thuney or anyone else up front. That’s on Edwards-Helaire not securing the ball well enough.
The Ravens are a rough matchup for Jones on the outside. His pass rush is diminished by all the play action, and he has to be careful about the path he takes because Lamar Jackson is a freakshow athlete who can turn a good pass rush into a 25-yard scramble.
And I saw the same thing you did against the run. Here are consecutive plays on the Ravens’ first touchdown drive:
See how he doesn’t shed the block, and the back runs by?
How here’s the next snap:
On that one, he gets sucked down into the middle, and the ball goes outside.
It looked like the Ravens were intentionally doing this — isolating Jones, forcing him into decisions, and going the other way. Almost like a pick-and-roll in basketball, putting him in a bad spot and reacting to his decision with a counter decision.
Here’s one more, and this may have been Jones’ worst snap of the night:
He just blanks on setting an edge, completely chasing the middle, which had to be someone else’s assignment. The mistake lets Jackson get around and downfield.
As always, football is more complex than we make it out to be. We might be misreading what Jones or one of his teammates was supposed to do on these plays.
But they do have a common theme, and his relative ineffectiveness against the run has been a career-long issue.
He’s talented and bought-in enough that it’s a weakness you’ll live with, but I do think it’s being exploited a little more when he’s on the edge. Harder to hide out there. No linebackers behind you.
This is something Steve Spagnuolo is going to have to address. Jones likes it on the outside, so Spagnuolo can use this as incentive — set the edge against the run, or you don’t get to rush the passer from the outside.
The problems certainly aren’t all about Jones. But this is one spot they can clean up.
I don’t want to re-litigate the Clark trade and contract. On the whole, he absolutely has not been worth the capital spent in terms of draft and salary cap, but it’s also true that he’s one of a handful of players the Chiefs would not have won the Super Bowl without.
Clark is their biggest cap hit (by far), and if you add in Anthony Hitchens, Chris Jones, Jarran Reed and others the Chiefs are spending about 25% of their cap on the defensive front.
This thing was put together to emulate what the Eagles did in 2018 and the 49ers in 2019, among others — if the Chiefs employ Patrick Mahomes on offense and can control the line of scrimmage on defense then they’ve got the whole thing figured out.
Jones is doing his part. Derrick Nnadi is strong inside. Tershawn Wharton has some bonkers pass rushes. But the production isn’t consistent enough to warrant the resources spent.
The good news, if you’re searching for it, is that this doesn’t have to be a long-term problem. The Chiefs can save $13.4 million by cutting Clark after the season, and another $8.5 million on Hitchens.
That money can be used as part of extensions for Tyrann Mathieu, Tyreek Hill, and/or Orlando Brown Jr., or to bring in help in free agency.
There are bigger issues at the moment, and certainly more pressing concerns. But I’ll be interested to see if the front office continues to attempt to stack the defensive front or adapts a new strategy.
Truly an outrageous display of agility, speed, and strength.
I count six Ravens — Malik Harrison, Tavon Young, Justin Ellis, Brandon Stephens, Anthony Averett, and Marlon Humphrey — who had a shot at him:
That’s more than half the defense — three corners, a safety, a linebacker and a defensive lineman, ranging in from 178 pounds to 350 — who have reason to believe they should have make a tackle.
There is simply no way something like that should happen. Kelce is different. He’s the only tight end in the league — honestly, maybe the only tight end in league history — who could turn that into a touchdown.
But the play won’t be remembered the same way because of the outcome. Sort of like this throw by Mahomes two days before Christmas in 2018:
I know now’s not the time, because you all are mad at the loss, but I had this thought after the Kelce play: if you made a list of the 100 most incredible plays in Chiefs history, how many would be in the last three seasons?
You’d have 65 toss power trap, punt returns by Dante Hall and Tamarick Vanover, probably a few catches by Tony Gonzalez, a Priest Holmes touchdown or two, that Montana touchdown pass on Monday night in Denver, and like 91 Mahomes plays, right?
I’ll be shocked if this ends up being 2018. And you know I’m not shocked by much.
There’s better talent on this team, higher motivation and — this is important but easy to overlook — more cohesion. That 2018 defense had rotted. Trust eroded.
There was infighting, and some players — particularly in the secondary — had come to feel scapegoated and unsupported by the coaches. It was really bad, and once it was obvious that Mahomes was skipping about five steps on the way to greatness it required a radical overhaul.
The defense now has some fundamental problems, but we’re not at the disaster point yet.
They are useless in the red zone — last in the league last year and now somehow worse, with no steps yet in eight tries. Much of that is entwined with the problems at the line of scrimmage and stopping the run, so if the Chiefs can find one fix they’ve probably found three.
I keep thinking about the Browns game here. The Chiefs were gashed in the first half, but went fumble-touchdown-botched punt-punt-interception after halftime.
The Browns did the Chiefs some favors in that game, calling some shotgun passes when they probably should have kept running it, but the Chiefs still made the stops.
This is a collective thing. There are some personnel changes the Chiefs can make. We’ll talk about Juan Thornhill and Daniel Sorensen soon, and Willie Gay Jr. will return from IR at some point.
But the Chiefs need more consistency from Nnadi and Jarran Reed in the middle. They need more assignment discipline from Jones. They need better tackling from basically everyone.
They have some problems, but this is not an unwinnable war like it was in 2018.
Edwards-Helaire will go as the offensive line goes.
My view is that he’s better than the general fan perception. He gets a lot of tough yards after contact, and there are plays like this that makes multiple good cuts and maximizes yardage:
But other than the touchdown in the opener against the Texans last year, it’s hard to remember a time he popped a big play, right?
That wasn’t a good run blocking line last year, and this one is still building, so I don’t want to make any definitive declarations on him either way.
My biggest surprise with him is in the pass game. There was enough tape of him at LSU to believe he was going to be a big problem for defenses in space — the answer to the evergreen complaint about not enough production behind Kelce and Hill.
But he only has 39 catches in 15 regular-season games so far. The Chiefs don’t trust him in blitz pickups, and that’s a big part of this, but I wondered if we’d see him lined up as a receiver more, and whether the Chiefs could go cat-and-mouse and instead of Edwards-Helaire staying in to block the linebacker have him go out in space and force the linebacker to cover him.
I’m not on the bust train. I know a lot of you are.
But this isn’t what you spend a first-round pick for. This isn’t what the first running back taken in a draft is supposed to look like, especially when he’s put into a situation that should help generate success.
I am fully on Team Juan here. Especially at this point in the season.
Assuming he’s 100% physically — which Juan has said, and the coaches gave him all but three defensive snaps in the opener — I think you ride with the talent.
That doesn’t mean Sorensen is a bum. He’s a good player, and there’s value in what he brings — primarily the instincts in big moments.
I also want to point something out here on the Jackson jump-pass touchdown. Watching live, you see Sorensen as the closest defender and Mathieu with his hands in the air like The hell you doing??? and you naturally assume Sorensen screwed this up.
Even after the post-game, when Mathieu took the blame for it, he said it in a way that gave the impression that he was being a good teammate. But if you watch this clip, I’m not sure Sorensen screwed it up:
Looks to me like the miscommunication was between Mathieu and Ward, and that Sorensen just happened to be the closest guy to chase Brown toward the end zone.
This is one of those spots where the All-22 will help. Or, better yet, football losing this culture of secrecy.
But if we’re going to talk about Thornhill and Sorensen, I just want to put that on the record: a play that looked like Sorensen’s fault in real time may not have been.
Thornhill ended up with just 11 snaps against the Ravens. Reid was asked about that.
“Juan and Dan, they do certain things the same and a couple things different,” Reid said. “But it all kind of equals out. Dan had the better camp, and so on. Maybe a little more consistency there. We love Juan and he’s getting himself back to where he was his rookie year. I don’t want to take anything away from the effort he’s put in to do that. We’ll just take it step by step here.”
Reid talks in code, but I think what he’s saying here is that Sorensen has a better feel for the scheme, and makes better decisions more consistently. Sorensen’s limitations are in straight line speed and tackling. The former you can live with; the latter can be aggravating.
But coaches often default to predictability, and if they better trust Sorensen to be in the right spot that goes a long way.
This has been a curious thing for a year now. Thornhill worked his way back and was playing the majority of snaps before a bad game or two last year. Reid called him “a situational guy,” his snaps went way down, and then he was one of the Chiefs’ best defenders against Buffalo in the AFC championship game.
We had every reason to believe he’d be 100 percent physically by this season, and I think he probably is, but he was also playing loads of preseason snaps so it was obvious something wasn’t hitting.
My best read on this is that the coaches still trust Sorensen more, and that trust goes a long way in this scheme. That’s a hard spot for Thornhill — he needs to build trust to play, but also needs to play to build trust.
If it was up to me, I’d err on the side of giving Thornhill too much, with the faith that he’s smart and dedicated and will get better. If that faith isn’t validated, then you can always go back to Sorensen in December and go from there.
But the best version of the Chiefs defense is with Thornhill making plays. They should prioritize that.
Even as perhaps the president of the Chiefs Need To Stop The Run club, I can’t argue the point with much passion. They haven’t stopped the run in years — the finished 29th in yards-per-rush-against when the won the Super Bowl, and haven’t been even top half in that statistic since 2015, when they finished 16th.
It has not mattered much.
But I do wonder if this season could be different, just because the AFC’s top contenders — which I’m viewing as the Browns, Ravens, and Bills — are each strong on the ground.
To be clear: This is not a “you gotta establish the run” take, or even a “limit Mahomes’ opportunities as much as possible” take
This is a “the Chiefs are crap at this one thing here, so if you do that really well you can move the ball effectively” take.
But let’s get past this a little bit, OK?
Because I want to make sure we emphasize a few things that I’m not sure are getting enough attention.
First, the Chiefs have allowed eight touchdowns on eight defensive red zone opportunities. Nobody in the league has allowed more red-zone touchdowns, and this isn’t a small-sample thing — they were last in the league a year ago and swore they’d fix it over the offseason.
Again, some of this goes hand in hand with stopping the run, but if the Chiefs don’t get this fixed then a lot of this other stuff doesn’t matter.
Second, they put themselves in a lot of bad spots against the Ravens. They had four drives stall or worse after 3rd downs with at least 9 yards to go. Mahomes’ atrocious interception was on a third and 12.
The Chiefs are as well equipped as any team in modern NFL history to convert 3rd and long, but they’re not so talented that the basic rules of football don’t apply.
Some of this is on the play calling, because they’re running a lot on first and 10 — 26 times (ninth-most in the league) compared to 22 passes (20th most). They’re getting just 3.65 yards per attempt on those plays compared to 12.95 yards per pass.
But some of it is execution, too. The line has to be better, and the backs have to get the yards where they can.
So, is this really a thing that people say?
Or is this one of those things we all do — I’m QUITE sure I do it, too — where we hold up straw man arguments and do a dunk show?
I mean, KU AD Travis Goff essentially went on the record that KU would leave if given the opportunity.
Nobody wants to be the last one there.
We make football complicated, and it often is, but this isn’t: K-State is averaging 5.3 yards per rush, and giving up 1.9 yards per rush. They’re outrushing their opponents by an average of 171 yards per game.
Yes! I hear you! There are no more Southern Illinoises or Nevadas on the schedule* so maybe let’s see how this works against Oklahoma and Iowa State.
* Though there is a Kansas.
But I do think that even as passing is generally more efficient than running there’s room for variance, especially in college football, and if you have Deuce Vaughn and a good line and an injured starting quarterback it makes sense to keep your strengths your strengths.
Now, all that said, the hard stuff is now. Oklahoma State has athletes, and some toughness at the line of scrimmage.
This is a big test.
Hard disagree.
Whatever the location, there’s enough silly Kansas City infighting that a some from the Northland or Jackson County would simply swear off the team if it moved to Overland Park.
And if people are prioritizing convenience, I’m not sure adding to the traffic snarl around 435 and 69 is the best approach, either.
We can all cherry pick examples to prove any point we want, but I think of a ballpark that could bring people downtown and be a force multiplier of sorts for the growing momentum and energy we have there.
I think of a ballpark that could incorporate the best parts of Kauffman Stadium but also feel more a part of the world around it. That would be closer to where more people live.
It’s hard not to think of the airport conversation here. KCI is one of the country’s quickest airports from car to gate, and a lot of us grew to love that ease and convenience. When I lived downtown I could be through security within a half hour of leaving my apartment.
But building something new doesn’t mean losing the good parts of what’s being replaced. John Sherman is no dummy. He’s familiar with Kansas City. Safe assumption that he and the architects he’d hire would take all this into consideration and make sure a new ballpark would be as convenient as possible, with bells and perks and whistles that just won’t ever be in a massive parking lot in a part of town that’s never really been developed.
Kansas City is a weird place. We get offended and angry when we’re overlooked or underestimated, but when major projects are introduced our default is to say it can’t or shouldn’t be done. Kansas City is capable of more than we sometimes believe.
So I’m optimistic, or at least curious, but I also am firmly in a stance that I’ll keep repeating: we don’t know enough to make any big declarations.
If the plans come back and the Royals don’t have satisfactory answers about funding or logistics, then Kauffman gets renovated and nobody’s hurt in the process.
If the plans come back and the toughest questions are answered, then we have something new and awesome.
A lot of us have strong and personal stances on this because baseball evokes strong and personal emotions. That’s one of the best parts of the sport. It gets in your blood.
We should welcome that and celebrate it, but I hope that no matter which end of the argument you start this journey on you’re open minded enough to change your stance as the information materializes.
There just isn’t a downside to trying.
This week, I’m particularly grateful to be traveling for work again. That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it? I’m typing these words from Baltimore, and I can’t wait to see my wife and kids and dog and sleep in my own bed.
But it also feels good to be on the road again, active, able to see people and things in person and try to turn those opportunities into a better understanding of your favorite teams.
This story was originally published September 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.