Mellinger Minutes: So the Chiefs stink ... plus Mahomes’ turnovers, and Tyrann Mathieu
If your biggest concern about the Chiefs is Patrick Mahomes then you don’t have any big concerns.
That has been one of the phrases repeated here often over the last three-and-almost-half seasons, and it’s been true.
But it used to be true because Mahomes was consistently awesome. At the moment, it’s true only because there are other and bigger problems.
For now, though, we will focus on the quarterback.
Specific misperceptions have developed around Mahomes’ rise to stardom, and they’re understandable, because they stem from the incredible moments for which he’s become known.
Because he’s capable of magic, people who don’t watch him regularly often don’t realize that his real superpower has always been his decision-making.
The misperceptions have been that he’s careless and focused on the highlight, when the reality is that he had the NFL’s lowest interception rate last season.
Put another way: Mahomes had a 1.0 interception percentage in his second year as a starter, at age 24. Here are the four other certain Hall of Fame quarterbacks in the league, and when they first had a season with an interception rate of 1.0 or lower:
Tom Brady: 10th season, age 33.
Aaron Rodgers: seventh season, age 31.
Russell Wilson: 10th season, age 33.
Ben Roethlisberger: lol, never.
Right now, Mahomes’ interception percentage of 3.2 is stuck between Sam Darnold, who just got benched, and Tua Tagovailoa, who the Dolphins appear to ready to bench.
Three of Mahomes’ interceptions have hit receivers in their hands or shoulders, and there was a time that was a logical explanation. But by now those mistakes are outweighed by what might be the three worst decisions of his career.
His genius used to be his ability to extract wild highlights from a play while avoiding the mistakes that are usually inevitable in a chaotic game.
Add this one to the list:
That’s just a really stupid play, which is not something anyone could have said about literally any snap of Mahomes’ career before now. And this season it’s accurately said every week.
That’s a first down. Darrel Williams is WIDE open at the bottom of the screen, but even if that was an impossible pass to make, Mahomes could have run for a few yards ... and even if he thought he couldn’t get back to the line of scrimmage, he could have thrown it into the crowd and fought on second down.
Instead, he chose to throw to a well-covered receiver who by all appearances was never in the play and was not ready for the ball.
The only logical explanation is that the Chiefs were already down 17-0 and Mahomes felt like he needed to play hero-ball, but by now he has to know better. Game situation has its place, but that can’t be an excuse for stupid passes in the second quarter.
One of the craziest parts about Mahomes’ first three seasons is that he really never played poorly. His lowest passer rating during his MVP year was the time he threw for 313 yards and the Chiefs scored 30 against a Jacksonville team that had gone to the AFC Championship Game the year before and was giving up nothing in a 3-1 start before that game.
He wasn’t great against across two games in 2019, but his numbers would have looked a lot better without a few drops and dubious missed calls, and besides, that stretch included two wins by a combined score of 64-26.
Last year, his least-effective game may have been in the Chiefs’ loss to the Raiders, but even then he threw for 340 yards and two touchdowns.
This year, through seven games, we’ve seen what might be the worst three starts of his career. Passer rating is an imperfect stat, but he’s never been lower than his 62.3 against the Titans, and that number does not include this careless fumble:
What is that? He already had the first down. Slide. Or at least cover the ball with both arms.
For what it’s worth, Mahomes took the blame after the game.
“I’ve just got to be better early in the game so we don’t get behind like we did,” he said. “They played the same coverages that they played (last week) against the Bills. I didn’t execute. There were open guys you could see on the tablet. There’s pockets that were clean that I scrambled from. I have to be better.”
There are a lot of different problems conspiring at the same time. Other quarterbacks are closing the gap, other contenders are adding talent, and what some of us thought was merely a broken offensive line in the Super Bowl turned out to be the beginning of the Chiefs stinking.
Because maybe the offensive line isn’t fixed — Orlando Brown is getting beat by a lot of speed-rushes, which is exacerbated because Mahomes tends to drift — and now the league’s best offense (or what used to be, anyway) scores three dang points against a defense that had given up 30 or more against good teams before this and was missing most of its secondary.
I thought this was interesting: After the game, colleague Sam McDowell asked Chiefs coach Andy Reid to elaborate on his opening remark that, “I’m seeing things that I haven’t seen before.”
“It’s with the guys,” Reid said. “Just different guys, guys that I’ve seen perform and not do certain things. We’re right there to do the right thing and make something happen, and it’s happening the other way. We’ve got to fix that.”
Reid does not talk in specifics, so some of this is speculation, but I heard that as commentary on Mahomes. I heard that as Reid saying that he’s seen Mahomes perform and not turn the ball over, and that Mahomes is in the right position to be productive and it’s going the other way.
That’s all true, obviously, but it’s interesting here because Reid never calls out players publicly.
They have a lot to fix. We’ve known that. A lot of what needs fixing is the quarterback. We haven’t seen that before.
This week’s eating recommendation is the hanger steak at Gram & Dun, and the reading recommendation is Chris Ballard on the quest to prolong athletic mortality.
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Just wanted to set the tone here early.
It’s going to be this kind of day, you guys.
I’m done with this. I’m done giving any credibility to the *fact* that they are one play from beating the Ravens and maybe two or three from beating the Chargers.
Those things are true, but to answer your question, if the Chiefs were 4-3 or even 5-2 with wins over the Ravens and/or Chargers, I think the conversation would be the same as it is now. The Chiefs have shown themselves to be completely and uncharacteristically noncompetitive against the last two competent teams they’ve faced.
The tone would probably be different.
But the problems would be the same.
This is a popular theory and one that’s been gaining steam the last few weeks. I would not tell you it’s baseless. I would tell you I don’t buy it.
Part of this is that I believe Andy Reid is an honest self-evaluator with an enviable mix of self-confidence and humility. I believe he approaches his job without ego, which leads me to the other part of why I don’t buy the theory:
He doesn’t have total control.
I believe that Reid and Brett Veach* have an interesting partnership, where Veach is something like 20 years younger than Reid and literally entered the NFL as Reid’s intern but has enough comfort and belief that he’s willing to push his own evaluations.
* I know I point this out too often, but we often use “Veach” as shorthand for a front office that includes other executives like Mike Borgonzi and Brandt Tilis. Many others.
We’re not in those meetings, but I assume the process can get messy and include disagreements. But with a basis of mutual respect, the group can make collaborative decisions that don’t rely on groupthink or intimidation.
Reid has final say, and he should. He’s earned that. But I think he knows that things went off the rails in Philly because he took full control. I believe he wants to avoid repeating that. If he thought the process was being compromised, he would be more likely to get a GM fired (ahem) than close his ears and make every decision himself.
Steven St. John made a good point in our Border Patrol segment yesterday, which is that (with hindsight) it’s worth wondering how much arrogance has clouded judgments and decisions and reality.
Judgments: that the Chiefs would have beaten the Bucs in the Super Bowl with a healthy offensive line, and that what we saw in that game was more of a fluky one-off that could be blamed on JV protection and not the dismantling of the Chiefs’ superiority and an open door through which opponents had been waiting to rush.
Decisions: that the Chiefs’ continued success really was as simple as fixing the offensive line, and that a first-round pick could be used on a luxury item like a running back, and that Chris Jones could pop outside and be just as effective (or more) from the edge as he’d been through the middle (without being further exposed against the run).
Reality: that the Chiefs had enough top-shelf talent to bend the NFL’s gravitational pull toward parity back the other way.
Winning games in the NFL is like fighting a tiger. You can do it, but you better respect the power you’re facing and the danger of going even a little off your focus.
The Patriots are the only team to do it consistently in the last two decades, and that required the marriage of the best coach of all-time, perhaps the worst division of all-time, and perhaps the best quarterback of all-time playing on below-market contracts. Also, it may or may not have required illegal filming of opponents and a pretty amazing list of lucky breaks.
The Chiefs are pushing against reality at the moment. They still have enough talent to be able to win, but these losses are muddying the waters and will make success the rest of the season more difficult than any of us anticipated even a month ago.
The Giants were 10-6 and 9-7 in their parade years, but the point stands. And a fair number of you are with Robert, and that’s worth noting. The list of teams that would trade problems with the Chiefs is shorter than it was before the last three weeks, but still significant.
The path to success requires a locker room that is showing signs of cracks rallying together, and also requires coaches who appear unprepared with players who are not performing to figure out what exactly they do well.
That’s a lot of ifs, but here’s my best guess of what that would look like, in general order of importance:
- Patrick Mahomes stops making rookie mistakes.
- The offense stops being surprised at seeing the same coverage each week and starts dictating terms.
- The defense figures out a way to pressure opposing quarterbacks.
- And this team starts creating turnovers.
I know it’s not that simple. I know it requires the offensive line to be better, and for Mahomes to better handle the moments when the protection fails. It requires the confidence to take the shorter and intermediate stuff, because they know all that matters is moving the ball and that eventually the shots will come.
It requires Chris Jones being more productive and the defense forcing more third-and-longs where he can move back inside and be at his best. It requires Steve Spagnuolo to draw up the right blitzes and deploy them at the right moments. It requires the secondary to be comfortable being put in difficult positions, knowing that eventually they’ll be able to tip the probabilities in their favor.
These fixes will be made more difficult by the rocky waters the Chiefs have created.
This season can go any of a number of ways.
The Chiefs talk a lot about the strength of their locker room, and of their leaders.
These next four games will tell us a lot.
That’s what the rest of the season will determine, but at this point I would say no.
I’m not sure how you could make a passionate argument for yes.
I need to just let this go, but I’m sad that we don’t have the locker room access of The Before Times. I could give you much better insight on the locker room dynamics that way.
This is a conversation for another day, but especially with the NFL I worry that the tightening of access and general paranoia of many teams will create less understanding and more divisions between teams and fans.
We’re seeing some of that play out on Twitter. But my worry is that we’re only going to see more and more of that as fans and athletes continue to feel farther and farther apart.
Speaking of that …
I actually don’t think there’s “so much” hate directed at Tyrann Mathieu.
What I think is that athletes of a certain stature can find anything they want about themselves on Twitter.
Hell, I’m a nobody sports columnist and even I can find anything I want about myself on Twitter.
Maybe I have a blind spot for Mathieu. That is absolutely possible. I find him fascinating and terrific and a potential Hall of Famer. I believe he was the second-most important player on the Chiefs’ rise to a championship.
I believe that he remains one of the team’s most popular players, perhaps behind just Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
But I also believe he needs to stay off Twitter, or at least wait until he’s home from a game to search for his name and give any thought to the worst that’s said about him by frustrated fans on modern America’s bathroom wall.
Mathieu is a different guy. Judged by size and speed and strength, he should not be a three-time All-Pro or a member of the 2010s All-Decade Team. He got there with next-level intelligence, an insatiable work ethic and maniacal competitiveness.
He’s self-aware, which is rare for an athlete at his level, and knows that his emotions “can go left or right,” in his words. But he also understandably believes that those emotions are part of what’s pushed him to the top of his profession.
If I’m right that Mathieu is actually quite popular among Chiefs fans, he certainly would not be the first or last to use the delusion of manufactured enemies as extra motivation.
But I do think someone he trusts should convince him to stop searching for his name, because going off on criticism that should not matter as your team is getting its butt kicked is a bad look for anybody ... and an especially bad look for a leader.
Sure. Yes. Absolutely. That’s what comes with leadership.
But the same as it wasn’t just Mathieu in 2019, it’s not just him now. Those of us on the outside can guess about what is or isn’t being done in private, but the truth is that the defense isn’t even good enough for specific criticisms right now.
Mike Hughes was one-on-one with A.J. Brown far too often on Sunday, and he was overmatched. But that’s on the coaches for putting an undersized corner who’s never been a starter in an awful matchup.
It’s also on the pass rush — specifically Chris Jones and Frank Clark — for leaving the secondary to cover longer than is realistic.
It’s also on the coaches for not scheming pressure, and the linebackers for not covering well, and the front office for getting behind the sticks on some contracts and not having better answers.
You see where this is going?
The offense’s problems are on the pass-catchers for not getting open — there’s too much standing around when the ball doesn’t come out on time — and the line for not being more consistent, and the coaches for not having better plans, and the front office for maybe not fixing the line, and Mahomes for turning situations he used to fix into turnovers.
You see where this has gone?
The Chiefs have too many problems to focus on just one, or to blame just one player.
As we begin to think about the fixes, that can be helpful or detrimental.
Again: The strong locker room the Chiefs often reference is being tested in a new way. We’ll see.
I’m with you, and you’re saying as much in different words, but I’ll just put it plainly:
Twitter is not a real place.
The Chiefs have a good front office. They have a good coaching staff. They have good players.
The stuff is all there, internally. Two butt-whippings in three weeks does not change that.
The test is whether they continue to operate that way.
Because, just being real:
Frank Clark will almost certainly be cut after this season. Anthony Hitchens, too. The Chiefs would save $13.4 million in cap space on Clark, and another $8.5 million on Hitchens. Mathieu will be out of contract. Tyreek Hill and Orlando Brown have been expecting to negotiate extensions.
The Chiefs’ Super Bowl championship will be a highlight in Kansas City history no matter what. I will not diminish that or insinuate that it was easy. But you’ve also heard me say that nobody involved with the Chiefs right now will consider it a success if they don’t win more, and I would add that coming together around a reigning MVP quarterback and a defense everyone understood to be broken is a different challenge than what they face if this season doesn’t get aligned quickly.
At some point, guys start thinking about their own future.
I mentioned earlier that I might have a blind spot for Mathieu, but I remain a believer. I believe that letting him go creates more problems than solutions.
We’re far too early to know what the specifics will be, but just for argument’s sake, let’s say that’s how this goes — so bad that either the Chiefs don’t want Mathieu back at his price, or he’s so turned off by the experience that he wants to leave.
Well … then what?
At that point you have one premier defensive lineman (who has not met expectations through seven games, by the way), a young core of linebackers and a secondary with no pelts on the wall.
It’s OK to want to tear something down, but if that’s the path you choose then you better have a plan for what to build in its place.
The Chiefs could go shopping in free agency. Chandler Jones and Jason Pierre-Paul could be among the free-agent pass-rushers available to them. Stephon Gilmore and Joe Haden could be among the free-agent defensive backs.
But you’re still talking about players who are mostly in their 30s and would have to navigate changing systems and teammates, and who would come with high price tags.
There are no easy fixes. The NFL is structured to disallow easy fixes. My default belief is that Mathieu is part of the solution and not the problem, but we have 11 games to get a better idea of what’s needed.
I had the same thought watching live, and when I went back and watched again I changed my mind … slightly.
There are certainly snaps like this, where his man speed-rushes past him …
… but there are also snaps like this, where he locks his man in place …
… and snaps like this, where watching again you realize that his man got by him, but only by going 12 yards deep on the pass rush, which should be enough protection to, at worst, allow Mahomes a lane to create more time …
He’s definitely better against strength than speed, and every opponent knows the scouting report.
But we don’t know yet whether Brown would be a good investment. We have seen just seven games. We’ll have 11 more to watch how he evolves, and importantly whether Mahomes grows comfortable with Brown’s strengths and weaknesses.
I’m not saying this is how it will go, but you could do worse than have Brown on a contract that would pay him below the elite left tackles for a performance that would be mostly strong, with the weaknesses predictable and easy to account for.
This is one of them good problems, but when you employ Patrick Mahomes, Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce at their peak, you don’t get to choose between winning now and winning long-term.
You must do both.
That’s a difficult balance, obviously, and there is no perfect way to do it. The stakes are higher, but so are the rewards.
Because I don’t think you can justify rebuilding when you have Patrick Mahomes. The expectation is that you will be a Super Bowl contender every season. Some teams will be better than others, sure, and if the 2021 Chiefs stay on tilt they won’t be the first to follow a Super Bowl loss with a disappointing season.
But you have to try, and try every year.
The truth is the Chiefs haven’t made any egregious mistakes. The Frank Clark trade was an objective loss, but they also won a Super Bowl anyway. Anthony Hitchens will carry some dead cap next year, but he also brought a much-needed professionalism and intelligence to the middle of the defense.
The offensive line is far from perfect, but with the options that were available, where did the Chiefs mess up?
One thing to keep in mind: Even if this season ends at 7-10 or whatever — and that would be REALLY bad — any team with a core of Mahomes-Hill-Kelce-Jones and some cap space (not to mention a top 12-ish draft choice) would be a pretty good bet for a quick rebound.
Can we stop talking about the Chiefs now?
Fine. One more.
But only for me to say that the answer depends entirely on how much you like your mother-in-law.
Guys, please, I hope you see the news about KC NWSL — we had the news this morning that the team will build the world’s first stadium for a women’s professional sports team in downtown Kansas City.
The renderings look sweet, too. Check it out — 11,000 seats and $70 million, right off the streetcar line.
They’ll put it by the river and the Bond bridge, and I do not think you can overstate how much this will mean for the franchise’s future.
Even if you don’t care about sports or soccer — in which case, wow, very cool that you’re with us some 4,000 words deep in a goofy sports timesuck — there will be loads of concerts and other events and the whole thing will only be good for Kansas City.
It’s huge news. Hope you check it out.
OK, back to the timesuck …
Do you have any idea what KU would do to trade current football realities with K-State?
I get that the loss to Iowa State stung, and I get that there’s an unmistakable insult to a team you just beat firing its coach.
But, guys. The last time K-State won fewer than five games in a non-COVID season was 2004. The last time KU won more than three games was 2009.
I get that the question is mostly in jest, and that KU played well for most of that game against Oklahoma.
But it still feels a little weird to celebrate a loss this much — yes, I’m aware of the calls — and KU still has mountains to climb before they begin trying to climb the real mountains.
You guys know that part of my job is telling you the truth, even when you don’t want to hear it, so here goes:
KC’s worst meat is brisket.
We just don’t do it well.
I’m looking at every one of ya’s, all of you, especially you monsters who slice the brisket like deli meat. Tyler Harp, if you’re reading this, you are the exception. Everybody else: Be more like Tyler.
Also, I’m sorry, I try not to judge others for personal choices, but just know that if we ever go to a barbecue restaurant together and you order pulled pork I will judge you with a harsh spirit, but I’ll try to do it silently.
I’m not ashamed to say I used to go hard in the paint. Never cussed, at least I don’t think so, but I do remember telling an e-mailer I felt sorry for his family. Because I did.
But at some point I achieved a combination of the thick skin I always pretended to have as well as the realization that winning an email battle is as important to me as what a stranger ate for breakfast.
I’m not as timely as I wish I was, but I prioritize reading and responding to every email I get. I make an exception for people who are unnecessarily rude — and I say unnecessarily here because sometimes I deserve it — but the worst I’ll ever say now is something like, “Thank you for reading and I promise to give this all the time and thought it deserves.”
Sometimes they get it, other times they don’t. Either way I’m good.
This week I’m particularly grateful for the last seat on the plane. The flight I booked home from Nashville was delayed to the point that I was going to be stuck in St. Louis on Monday night. Called to see about a change of plans, and your boy has never been so thrilled to fly from Nashville to Kansas City through St. Louis.
I’m typing this at the airport, but if things go to plan I’ll be waking up Tuesday morning in my own bed and walking the kids to school.
This story was originally published October 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.