Mellinger Minutes: Are the KC Chiefs back? Why the turnovers? And a downtown ballpark?
Look, maybe this won’t surprise you. Maybe no stat from the 2021 Chiefs will surprise you. But here goes.
The Chiefs have 14 turnovers through five games, on pace for 48 this season, which would be the most the NFL has seen since the 2000 Chargers (who finished 1-15).
Even if you chop off the pace at 16 games, they’d have 45, which would be the most in the league since the 2006 Raiders (who finished 2-14).
There is no through-line on the turnovers. The Chiefs have turned it over in critical spots, like Clyde Edwards-Helaire’s fumble in Baltimore, and in moments that really didn’t matter, like the dropped snap when the Chiefs were already being beat to bits by the Bills.
Patrick Mahomes has thrown interceptions when he thought his receivers would be in a different spot, and he’s thrown interceptions on perfectly fine passes that hit his receivers in the hands, and he’s thrown interceptions on the two worst plays of his professional career.
Each week, coach Andy Reid stands in front of the cameras and says they’re working on it. Each week, he seems genuinely surprised that it’s not been fixed.
“I’m not sure I’ve been around quite this many,” he said after watching his team lose three more turnovers during Sunday’s 31-13 win at Washington.
Let us be clear: The Chiefs won, but they are not fixed. At best, they stopped getting worse. They still need to tackle better and catch better and take care of the ball better. They still need to be more dangerous on defense and reliable on offense. And now there’s this thing where Mahomes is making YOLO throws to nobody in particular as he’s being dragged to the grass. It’s impossible to understand.
But, what the heck, let’s use at least a few paragraphs here to go optimistic and wonder out loud:
What happens if and when the Chiefs stop turning the ball over as if there’s a cash prize involved?
You might know that the Chiefs are averaging 30.8 points per game and 3.22 points per possession. The former is slightly below their 2018 rate and the latter is slightly above.
Consider this: The Chiefs’ turnover rate this season is the highest in the league since 2006, and there are some signs* that at least some of this is bad luck.
* I’m thinking mostly here about losing five of seven fumbles, and about three passes that have hit receivers in body parts and become interceptions.
So, just for conversation’s sake, let’s play with the numbers a bit and give the Chiefs a league-average turnover rate. That would give the Chiefs nine extra possessions, so even if you ignore what that means for the opponent’s success — and opponents have scored 31 points off the Chiefs’ turnovers — this means the Chiefs have essentially taken 29 expected points and lit them on fire.
At that point, they would be averaging 35.7 points per game and 3.8 points per possession which, basically, nobody’s done outside of a video game.
Remember: That’s with a merely average turnover rate. And the Chiefs have been under the league average in each of Reid’s previous eight seasons here.
The message is clear. The Chiefs have one of the most explosive and effective offenses in league history right now. It’s just being muddied up by a consistent stream of mistakes that before these last six games we all would’ve seen as out of character for them.
We’ll get more deeply into the turnovers below, and the Chiefs need to fix their turnover problem before we give them credit for it, but we may have seen the most accurate microcosm of this team yet:
In the first half of Sunday’s game, their offense was sloppy and they trailed a mediocre team.
In the second half, the offense didn’t turn it over and the defense improved and they outscored the same team 21-0.
This week’s eating recommendation is the chicken nachos at Tiki Taco, and the reading recommendation is McKay Coppins on The Men Who Are Killing American Newspapers.
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The best way I’ve come up with thinking about it is this:
At least they’re no longer getting worse.
They blew out a mediocre team, on the road. They faced some doubts and answered them. They made a few lineup changes, some tweaks to the play-calling, and they bossed the game away in the second half. They showed both explosion and execution.
We’ll go through some plays below, but right here let’s start with three that I thought told the story.
First, the defense. This play here probably didn’t pop out to you as you were watching live, and that’s part of why I want to highlight it. This came on a blitz — the Chiefs blitzed 13 times Sunday, producing more pressure than they had in any other game this season — with a stunt on the defense’s right side, and coverage behind it that stayed on point.
The play isn’t anything fancy. Washington quarterback Taylor Heinicke has a beat to get the ball out, but there’s nowhere for him to go with it. Watch this: Everybody’s in their lane, collapsing the pocket, showing two things the Chiefs haven’t had enough of: pressure and nailing their individual assignments.
Here’s another good snap. The Chiefs have been vulnerable to short passes, including screens, but watch Nick Bolton toward the top of the screen work his way around the blocking, then get to the ball carrier and wrap him up and bring him down.
This is a clinic:
Now let’s do a couple on offense. Mahomes was back on his nonsense again, with a few snaps where he did some stuff that normal human quarterbacks know they shouldn’t even try.
We’re not going to look at that snap here, because that one deserves its own question, but here’s a third-and-6 scramble where Washington plays good defense. Mahomes and Kelce turn it into street ball and get the conversion anyway.
Watch Kelce’s reaction when he gets up. He knows what he’s got.
And then this one is more basic. This is just the offensive line having its way, and not just that — this is the coaches knowing the offensive line will have its way, and trusting that they can convert a short touchdown run the boring way.
For the first time in Reid’s time here, the Chiefs don’t have to turn short yardage into performance art. They can just push the guys in front of them backward and watch the running back cross the goal line:
So, you’re asking the question about if the Chiefs are back.
I don’t think we can say that yet.
But the path to getting back starts with a performance like that.
Yeah, that was absurd.
Let’s have a look:
Here’s a funnier angle:
Mahomes said something interesting about this after the game. Actually, he wasn’t talking about this specific play. He was talking about that gawd-awful-what-are-you-doing interception toward the end of the first half, but he mentioned that a few teammates — Orlando Brown and Tyreek Hill he mentioned specifically — immediately came to him with positive vibes.
Keep being you, was the message, an expression not just of trust, but of need.
I can’t really explain Mahomes’ decision there. He can’t either. Same with the third-down pass in the second half in Baltimore. There’s this common perception that Mahomes is basically Brett Favre, that he’s some wild risk-taker, but the truth is he led the league in interception rate last season and this is the first time we’ve seen inexplicable decisions like this from him.
The easiest explanation is that he’s feeling some added weight with the defense’s struggles, and I do think that’s part of the problem, but either way the moment makes something clear:
The Chiefs rely on Mahomes’ creativity and ability to sort of break good defenses — not just to move the football, but as a rallying cry.
People like you and me — fans and media — can sometimes make too big of a deal out of the intangibles. We talk about heart and competitiveness and grinding through adversity. That stuff is real, and it matters, but there are times that I think we use it as a crutch when we don’t have a better explanation.
Here is an exception. I believe that Mahomes’ unicorn stuff is valuable for more than the extra yards. I believe it lifts his teammates, and that it gives them reason to believe that quite literally anything is possible as long as he’s upright*.
* Actually, now that I typed that, I think we have also seen that anything is possible when he’s horizontal, too.
Football teams need edges, and that’s a big part of the Chiefs’ edge. They are aggressive and free, and at least some of that is the faith that their mistakes can be made up for later.
You’re bringing up the MVP, and it’s certainly possible, but Mahomes’ case could be hit by at least two factors working against him.
The first is that only Zach Wilson has thrown more interceptions, and you know people will bring that up. If he slows down the turnovers, there could be a case like, Yeah but he only threw three over the last 11 games, or whatever, but that’s a hill he’ll have to climb.
The other is that I sort of feel like people outsideof KC are starting to get sick of him and want to move on to the next thing. Every transcendent athlete goes through this. It’s not hate on Mahomes, per se, and it’s not unique to football. Michael Jordan should have won at least two more MVPs.
I’m just making the observation that there is a noticeable (and understandable) desire to fall in love with Justin Herbert, Kyler Murray, Josh Allen and others. Heck, Matthew Stafford would make for a tidy story, too.
But I do think Mahomes is the best player in the league, and we’ll see that more times than not over the next 11 games.
I thought Darrel Williams was good!
We dropped the video of his second touchdown earlier, but he had a couple plays like this where he got extra yards on his own by beating guys who had the angle and/or advantage:
From the very beginning, it’s been obvious what the Chiefs saw in and loved about Edwards-Helaire. It’s also been always been an enormous risk to use a first-round pick on a running back, especially on a team that has Mahomes under center.
You want to find ways for Mahomes to have more impact on the game, not hand the ball off more often.
Antoine Winfield Jr. is the guy I thought the Chiefs should have gone for at the time, though in hindsight the answer was Trevon Diggs. But either way, the thing with Edwards-Helaire was that he could be a justifiable pick if it was more about drafting the Chiefs’ third receiving option and less about drafting a guy to take 18 carries a game.
That’s still the most surprising thing to me about Edwards-Helaire. I expected him to be an absolute nightmare to cover out of the backfield. His LSU tape is full of impressive route-running and ball skills, but he’s averaging fewer than three targets per game, and many of those have been on check-downs.
One of Edwards-Helaire’s limitations is pass protection, but I’m surprised the Chiefs haven’t more often played a sort of game of chicken with the defense and put him in space — cover him with the linebacker you’d like to blitz, or risk giving up a big play.
If you’re not using him like that — if he’s not expanding what you’re capable of offensively — then it’s hard to justify spending a first-round pick on him.
He’s a useful player. A good player, even. He’s been productive. But you make a good point, that running backs can often be found without spending big resources.
Yes!
It looked like Mecole Hardman should have better secured the ball on his fumble in Washington. Edwards-Helaire had some bad luck with a free defender punching blind and knocking the ball out in Baltimore. Tyreek Hill hadn’t fumbled in years.
Three of Patrick Mahomes’ interceptions have hit receivers in the body. Two have been the kind of decision that a high school quarterback would have to run laps for. At least one came on the baked-in risk that comes with an offense that relies heavily on so-called choice routes — they can be literally impossible to defend but often become interceptions if the quarterback and receiver don’t see the same thing.
But I don’t think there’s any team that’s ever played that can say all their turnovers happened for the same reason, or can be explained with the same logic.
I know that can be frustrating in the micro, but big picture, isn’t that a lot of what we love about sports and football?
Besides watching the games, one way you can know there’s no through-line on the turnovers is how Reid talks about them. He’s normally pretty good about not giving anything away, but when the subject is turnovers his body language, tone and words make it clear he’s as surprised and confused about it as anyone.
“We’ve got to get out of this cycle,” he said on Sunday.
The best explanation I can offer is about pressing. That’s the only thing that makes sense, other than a weird and extended run of bad luck. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the turnovers started in Baltimore with the pressure, peaked at the beginning of a Chargers game they knew was a showdown, and continued while chasing points against the Bills.
But I doubt it.
If this was 2018, I’d be more worried about the Chiefs. I’d be more inclined to think this is just a team that’s going to turn it over and you have to get used to it because that’s what they are.
But this is a quarterback who’s proven he’s turnover-averse, and is now playing behind the best line he’s had. The skill-position players need to believe they don’t have to take risks with the ball. They need to understand that the opposition’s only shot of stopping them is with a turnover, so whatever you do, just take your yards and get to the turf.
Maybe that sounds too optimistic, but you tell me what’s more likely: That a team that has been better-than-average on turnovers for eight seasons is suddenly the worst in the league at it? Or that they’ve hit a bad streak and will soon get out of it?
Speaking of what may or may not improve …
A list?
A list!
1. The turnovers. It just doesn’t make sense. This group has a long track record of protecting the ball.
2. Secondary’s coverage. I don’t want to make this all about Dan Sorensen, but he really is rotten as a centerfield free safety, and that breakdown was often too much for an already-stretched defense to make up for. Centerfield free safety coverage is Juan Thornhill’s strength, so if nothing else, that part is improved as long as he’s healthy.
3. D-line’s pressure. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo blitzed a little more than usual against Washington, and it was a lot more effective. I can’t tell you how much of that is something different the Chiefs did and how much was something Washington didn’t do, but I can tell you that one more benefit of putting Thornhill in centerfield is that when Sorensen comes on as that hybrid linebacker — his best position, anyway — he can be deployed as a blitzer, which he’s always been good at.
4. Linebackers’ slowness. Willie Gay Jr. will probably get on the field more and more, but overall that’s still not a fast group. They’re going to have to win more often with brains than speed, which is always going to be an issue, particularly in the pass game. They can be had with linebackers and running backs in routes.
I think I’ve told this story here before, but here goes:
Many years ago, when I was covering baseball full-time I became a little obsessed with the trade market. Especially for teams like the Royals, it seemed to me a place they could make up some ground. Scout the bejeezus out of everyone, know your talent better than anyone and find a trade partner with corresponding strengths and needs.
It would take some work, but that’s part of the fun, right?
So, anyway, I had no life back then — please do not ask me how much has changed — so I wore out my Internet connection and a few sources and came up with a trade that I thought was absolutely brilliant.
I wish like heck that I could remember the details now, but I think I had the Royals trading from a position of strength with pitching prospects and acquiring a position of need with an outfielder. I think that’s right, anyway.
I was actually pretty proud of the deal. The money worked. The positions worked. I even knew the Royals and the potential trade partner had a solid working relationship.
So I took my work to someone outside the Royals organization who I trusted, and — maybe I just created this part with my imagination, but still — he seemed impressed with the legwork.
“But there’s a problem,” he said. I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but he basically said: “The guy you have coming here is divorced and it’s getting ugly with him and his ex.”
The point was that there was a custody battle, and if the guy was changing teams he wasn’t going to make a big move geographically because of his kids. The trade may have worked in a vacuum, but not in real life.
The point is that I swore to myself then that I’d never put much stock into trade rumors unless I knew there was something more than speculation behind them. So with rare exceptions — I know for a fact the Chiefs were hot on Earl Thomas a few years back, and I think they would have made a deal the week after he broke his leg — I’m just not going to get too deep into these things.
But I will say this: If the Chiefs make a deal, they need to be hesitant about continuing to give up big draft capital, and the positions that make the most sense are cornerback and linebacker.
OK, let’s change topics …
This is about the Royals’ exploration of a downtown ballpark, and I hope you read the project that was in Sunday’s paper.
I hope you read everything we do, obviously, but this one more than most. It took took more time, required more research and included more conversations than usual.
I believe it’s the first time Royals chairman John Sherman has talked about this publicly since his brief remarks at the end of the Royals’ news conference announcing J.J. Picollo’s promotion to general manager.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and this is going to be a major topic for years. It could fundamentally change Kansas City as we know it and, anyway, please check it out.
OK. Moving on.
Humans in general and Kansas Citians in particular tend to value what they have over what they don’t know. Kansas Citians also adore convenience, and we sure have a lot of it — relatively little traffic, lots of parking everywhere, predictable waits in line.
The debate about whether to build a downtown ballpark will be intense and complicated. It will focus on site location, funding, design, development and many other factors.
At the moment, the opinions are passionate and seemingly clustered on either extreme. At the moment, each side can make a reasonable case.
STAY AT THE K: The teams that built downtown had awful stadiums that nobody wanted to keep. The K is great, it’s easy, it’s familiar and it has more and more history every year. Don’t tear down what is essentially a historical landmark, you monsters.
LET’S MOVE: Every team that’s moved downtown this century has been glad it did, and those stadium have helped spark new development that’s been good for citizens whether they care about baseball or not. This is what progress looks like. This is what big cities do.
So you probably know where I stand on this. I’m rooting for the project to succeed. I’ll take my family to games no matter what, but downtown ballparks have an energy that is good for both baseball and the cities.
But more than anything else, I hope we can all approach this for what it is: exploration.
I hope that those of us who start where I’m starting can change our minds if it becomes clear the funding won’t work, or the sites are bad, or downtown Kansas City would be turned into gridlock 81 times a year.
And I hope that those of you who start on the other side can change your minds if it becomes clear those questions are adequately answered.
I guess I’m sort of a Kansas City cliche, in that I didn’t love the idea of a new airport terminal at first. I wondered if people would really change their habits and use the streetcar. Kemper was enough of a dump that I was all-in on building a new home for Garth Brooks right away, but I do have that familiar pattern of waiting to be convinced.
I’ve wanted a downtown ballpark for years, but I also understand that not everyone thinks like me. And I understand that it’s up to proponents of the project to convince the skeptics.
If they don’t, then Kauffman Stadium will still be a nice place to play.
I just hope that the innovation Kansas City showed 50 years ago isn’t what holds us back from having the best next 50 years.
Sherman told me the Royals see “probably three, maybe four sites we consider to be viable.”
I want to be clear that I’m just speculating here, but it would not surprise me if those sites were the east village by city hall, the north part of the loop across the highway from City Market, south of the Kauffman Performing Arts Center, and somewhere on the east side that could connect downtown with 18th and Vine.
Again: This is just me speculating, but each of those sites could make sense.
Honestly, I’m for any of them.
Near city hall might be the best instant integration to business development. Across the highway from City Market could have the best highway access. South of the Kauffman Center would give the ballpark the skyline and might hit that sweet spot of existing businesses with room to grow.
But just personally, if they could figure a way to make it work, how cool would it be to have something that connects 18th and Vine?
There are business reasons to do it, but cultural reasons, too. It would expose a lot of people to a part of town and a part of Kansas City history that they otherwise might not see. The sentimental pull of getting back closer to where baseball began here would be strong.
But, all that said, I don’t think it’s time yet to take strong stances about location or funding or other details.
Those are critical questions, obviously, but I don’t think we have enough information yet — or, at least, the Royals aren’t sharing that information publicly yet.
But it’s interesting to talk about, right?
This is a bit of a tangent, because it’s not about baseball, but it’s frustrating that Kansas City sometimes serves to hold itself back because of these geographic and political divides. Our infrastructure suffers when we let businesses crisscross the border, and we’re slow on projects because the funding is complicated by politics.
I’m not blaming Chris for the perspective here. I’m not blaming anyone, really. There’s nothing that can be done to fully solve that problem. It just sucks in moments like this.
I don’t know how the funding will work.
“If this happens and it makes sense, you could expect (Royals ownership) will invest a meaningful amount of capital in the project,” Sherman said.
I believe him, but what does that mean? In the last round of renovations at Kauffman Stadium, the Glass family contributed $25 million of the total $250 million budget.
Now, $25 million is more than I have lying around in the couch, but I’m fairly certain that when Sherman says “a meaningful amount of capital,” he’s talking about much more than $25 million.
But how much more?
That’s all speculation at this point.
Now, I will strongly disagree with Chris that Johnson County gets no benefit from the Royals or from a new downtown stadium. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, and a strong downtown is good for everyone in the metro — from Platte City to Olathe, and from Bonner Springs to Blue Springs.
There are things that don’t show up in data reports, like making a city as attractive as possible for young professionals and folks considering relocation here. That’s part of why the streetcar was built, and will be extended, and has been a success.
If the Royals end up proposing some sort of bi-state tax, they’ll know the challenges, but I hope we get to a place where we don’t let this parochial in-fighting hold us back from progress.
I will not claim to know Sherman well. We’ve talked several times, and obviously I’ve studied the differences in the Royals since he took over. I think we’re starting to get to the point where there’s enough of a track record to have a better idea of his values and priorities, but it’s still been less than two years since the purchase.
That said, I would be shocked if he did that.
John’s entire adult life is a history of giving and contributing to Kansas City. Threatening his hometown with Nashville or Austin or Portland or whatever would be contradictory to who he’s shown himself to be for literally decades.
Here I think it’s worth noting that in what amounted to a sort of exit interview I did with David Glass, I found him to be genuinely perplexed about why people wondered if the Royals would move, regardless of who he sold the team to.
“That shouldn’t even be in anyone’s mind, whether (the buyer) was John or anybody else,” he said then.
Sherman was similarly dismissive of the possibility when he bought the team.
Now, it’s also true that the owners of the Royals and Chiefs have never had to say the quiet part out loud. Maybe this is cynical, but it’s true, and it has been mentioned by various powerbrokers over the years:
Kansas City being split down the middle by a state border means a business — in this case, a professional sports team — can always expect to get the best deal possible because both sides understand how easy it is to shop around.
Now, again, just using what I know about Sherman … I’d be very surprised if that level of threat is even on his mind.
My sense is that he and his investment group — all Kansas Citians, by the way — believe that, if done right, a downtown ballpark can be good for both the Royals and the city ... but that if it doesn’t work out, for whatever reason, they’ll continue playing at The K.
That’s my read on it, anyway.
This is a bad stretch. It’s the toughest stretch of the schedule — that should be noted — but it’s still a bad stretch.
K-State should expect to get at least one win out of Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Iowa State. Maybe two. They got zero, and none of those games was particularly close — unless you count Knowles’ kickoff return in the last 2 minutes against OU.
But I’d also say there is every reason to believe K-State can win at least four of its last six games, and would anybody spit at a 7-5 season?
I understand that’s not what you want with a sixth-year quarterback, but that’s also not a failure.
College sports are about perception. That’s truer in college sports than it is for sports at any other level. I think Big 12 programs can stomach losing to Oklahoma and whichever other school happens to be on a heater at the moment, but the problems amplify when you’re consistently losing to programs that should be peers.
For K-State, that’s basically everyone except Oklahoma.
Iowa State might not be as good as a lot of us expected the Cyclones to be before the season started, but it still has to be frustrating to see that program building a mirror image of Bill Snyder’s first rise. No two situations are exactly the same, and Matt Campbell deserves a ton of credit, but if it can work there, then why not in Manhattan?
Those frustrations are going to be there, and this is a critical stretch for Klieman. These are the moments that give us a window into a program.
My expectation is that K-State will play in another bowl, but nothing’s certain.
Well, we just talked about K-State. KU is a messy mess. Missouri is the biggest disappointment of the three.
Eli Drinkwitz has still done some good things, but the good is being buried by the repeated failures of the defense. They’re giving up 41.6 points per game in their last five against FBS schools.
The defense is kind of a horror show — missed tackles, disorganization and just getting consistently worked at the line of scrimmage.
There is still momentum with recruits, and I believe the future is brighter for Mizzou than the immediate past, but that’s not going to be true if they don’t get a lot better on defense and especially at the line of scrimmage.
As ever, Mizzou’s degree of difficult is amped — right now they have the 23rd-ranked recruiting class for 2022. That’s swell and would rank fourth in the Big 12 … but is eighth in the SEC*.
* 10th, if you count Oklahoma and Texas, and at least some of those recruits will play in the SEC.
That’s not an excuse, because it’s literally the life that Mizzou and Drinkwitz each chose.
These programs can build up. Missouri has the best recruiting base but has to make that count. The overall 2022 class includes seven players from Missouri with four- or five-star ratings. Two are committed to Mizzou. The only four-star recruit in Kansas is committed to Clemson.
That’s where these programs have to separate. I know it’s not easy, but there’s no path toward better success for those schools that doesn’t include getting the best local talent to stay.
This week, I’m particularly grateful that I got off my nonsense and admitted my wife was right about hiring someone to help with the lawn. I’ll still mow and edge, because I’m weird and I enjoy it, but holy smokes not having to stress about the rest feels like I’m on vacation. Also: Yes, I fully recognize how much of a middle-aged loser this all shows me to be.
This story was originally published October 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.