Mellinger Minutes: Melvin Ingram’s impact, KC Chiefs hopes, Patrick Mahomes’ arm + more
The Chiefs are struggling. They are trying to evolve. They are trying to regain what once felt permanent, and here they are, the defining stretch of their season and …
They’re investing.
One of the trademarks of general manager Brett Veach’s front office is assertiveness. They’re not smarter than anyone else. They do not have a secret. But they do believe in shooting their shot.
They’ve done it with Tyrann Mathieu and Frank Clark and Sammy Watkins and the offensive line. They’ve done it with extensions for Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce and Chris Jones. They’ve done it by constantly pushing the salary cap and by overhauling the defense before 2019 and the offensive line before 2021.
Most obviously, they’ve done it by trading up to draft Patrick Mahomes.
They haven’t hit on everything. Nobody does. But they’ve been selectively aggressive, to the point that the biggest fair criticism would be over-aggression — paying airport prices in salary, draft capital or both for specific moves that haven’t always been worth it in retrospect.
At the moment, that aggression comes in the form of edge rusher Melvin Ingram.
He’s a three-time Pro Bowler with 50 career sacks. He’s also 32 years old, with his best production almost certainly behind him. The Chiefs gave the Steelers a sixth-round pick, which isn’t much, but they’re also playing a (stud) rookie guard they took in the sixth round, so it ain’t nothing, either.
Ingram has 18 pressures and an 82.1 pass-rush grade, according to Pro Football Focus. The pressures would rank second on the Chiefs, behind Chris Jones. The pass rush grade would rank first.
Ingram is not as explosive as he once was, but you can see him affect games in bursts. Here’s a nice rush against Raiders right tackle Alex Leatherwood.
And here is his only sack of the season so far, also against the Raiders and Leatherwood (who has struggled as a rookie).
If Ingram isn’t still the player who racked up 29 sacks from 2015-17, he’s also not washed. More to the point, he does fit the Chiefs well — he and Clark can rush the edges, with Jones more consistently playing inside.
Clark has been productive and disruptive two weeks in a row, and Jones has been much better inside than on the edge.
Look, we know the Chiefs have problems. They’re eight games into the season and so far their identity is erratic, inconsistent and shook. They have four more turnovers than any other team in the league, and their defense makes up for their vulnerability against the run with a vulnerability against the pass (while also not creating many turnovers).
Opponents have settled on a way to slow the Chiefs, and the Chiefs have not yet settled on a way to counter. The pressure that opponents obviously felt against the Chiefs’ talent has now shifted to the shoulders of Mahomes and his teammates.
But this season is not yet lost. You can find hope, if you look for it.
The defense has gradually improved, same as it did in coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s first two seasons. More snaps for Juan Thornhill, Nick Bolton and (especially) Willie Gay Jr. have made a difference. The offense is still fighting itself, but you have to assume Mahomes will figure it out soon.
The roughest part of the schedule starts now: the 7-1 Packers this Sunday, then the 5-2 Raiders in Las Vegas, and the 6-1 Cowboys after that. The Chiefs are the only team in the league without a losing team remaining on their schedule. They are just 4-4 but retain an outsized part of the NFL conversation.
That will continue one way or the other, because the only thing the sports world likes more than a champion knocked out is watching a champion rise from the canvas.
This season can still go one of two ways. The Chiefs just invested to stack the odds in their favor.
This week’s eating recommendation is the cheeseburger pizza at Minsky’s (don’t judge) and the reading recommendation is this excerpt from Scottie Pippen’s book that’s every bit as much a window into his mind as The Last Dance was into Michael Jordan’s.
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I find that I’m at my most toxic in the morning, particularly after a short night’s sleep. The other day, I was feeling VERY toxic, and the kids were feeling VERY uncooperative, and 8 a.m. was coming fast and long story short I apologized when I picked them up that afternoon.
The drama with Tyrann Mathieu and Anthony Hitchens and social media is weird. I haven’t written about it, for a few reasons, including that there is no separation of good guys from bad: The (small number of) fans who say reprehensible things online need to grow up, and the athletes need to be bigger than to let this stuff get to them.
Fans who spew nastiness online should not be defended, and athletes who take on fans online cannot win.
The biggest surprise was Hitchens’ involvement. He’s such a level-headed dude — mature, intelligent, thoughtful. He’s the goods. That he cracked has to be taken as a significant sign of frustration, and you can understand why. He’s injured, the defense has been struggling and he’s likely to be cut after this season.
Mathieu apologized, and I hate that we’re in this place as a society where we instantly judge apologies, but I thought he came across as genuine. Mathieu is emotional, good and bad. It’s his superpower. It’s also his flaw.
I think we can move on. Players aren’t perfect and some fans act like fools. Doesn’t mean we have to make it a bigger thing than it is.
This stuff is baffling, you guys.
Every week the Chiefs see the same defense. I have not studied the Packers’ defense at all, but I can promise you they will rarely blitz, play two safeties deep and dare the Chiefs to run the ball and throw short.
And I can tell you the Raiders will do the same thing next week, and the Cowboys the week after that.
The Chiefs have the guys to rip through this sort of defense. They’re essentially playing 11-on-9 inside 20 yards and doing it with a coach who built a top-five offense almost exclusively through runs and underneath passes, as well as a tight end who — fact -check me if you want but I’m sure I’m right about this — was genetically engineered to dominate in the short and intermediate pass game.
Football is complex, and I don’t want to take away from the next-level strategy that goes into a lot of this but it seems impossible that the greatest offense since the 2007 Patriots has been stymied by — *checks notes* — playing two defenders 25 yards from the line of scrimmage.
Which is why I believe in a theory I explained here, but since we’re all friends I’ll summarize:
Mahomes is deeply and acutely aware of his place in NFL history, and once the momentum went from him chasing Tom Brady to Josh Allen and others catching up to him, the pressure that opponents had always felt defending his talent transformed into a burden that’s clouded his decision-making and diminished his patience.
If I’m close to right about any of that, what we’re basically seeing is the NFL lucking into a way to slow the Chiefs. Because taking away the deep ball is a sound strategy and a noble goal, but it only works to this extent with something defensive coordinators could not have predicted: that Mahomes would not have the patience and discipline to consistently execute shorter passes without the release of big shots.
I know there’s this human tendency to connect something you just experienced to something else, but reading Seth Wickersham’s biography of the Brady-Belichick Patriots, it was difficult not to be struck by the part about how Belichick game-planned against Peyton Manning’s Colts.
The short version is they took away a stretch run that Manning loved and defended in a way that made it easy for the Colts to run up the middle, but difficult to do most other things. The strategy was psychological: Belichick was betting that Manning would get bored running up the middle and force something else that the Patriots could take advantage of.
Doesn’t it feel like something similar is happening with Mahomes right now?
Because the Chiefs have more than enough to rip a two-high-safety look to shreds. Kelce is impossible to defend one-on-one, Byron Pringle has shown the ability to find open spots, and the running backs can catch it and run out of the flat. The Chiefs have the league’s second-best run-blocking offensive line, according to PFF, which will probably surprise some folks.
They even have a quarterback who can get an easy 5 to 10 yards by running against defenses that aren’t blitzing.
But they get bored and they take a shot on second down that they shouldn’t, which makes third down more difficult than it should be. Or they lose focus for a moment and a penalty sets them back. Or they’re so focused on getting every inch in traffic that they don’t prioritize ball security enough.
I know it sounds oversimplified, but I believe it: The key for the Chiefs isn’t about establishing another receiver or figuring out ways to beat these looks deep. The key is to be patient, and disciplined, and the vast majority of that has to come from the quarterback.
I’ve heard this a few times and I don’t see it. This throw here came with no forward momentum and went something like 60 yards downfield:
And this one here came out of his hand like a laser:
What I see is a guy who’s healthy physically but playing with doubt. I believe he’s shook, that he’s trying to make up for past plays, trying to consciously chase that invincibility he once carried instead of trusting that between his talent, his teammates and his coaches they have an answer for every question on the test.
I actually don’t even know if that point is debatable anymore. I think we’ve seen and heard signs that his teammates and coaches are feeling the same thing. They’re not going to say that directly, and they’re certainly not going to criticize The Franchise, but I think there’s a general consensus that Mahomes isn’t Mahomes, and that job one for all involved is to get him back there.
I think they will, too. We can get caught up in the negative, so perspective is important.
Because what’s likelier: That Mahomes won MVP and then Super Bowl MVP and then went 16-1 in starts with something resembling an NFL offensive line and then turned into Jeff George?
Or that Mahomes is having the first actual bad stretch of his career and that with the help of talented teammates and proven coaches he’ll get his mojo back soon?
The drama isn’t whether Mahomes is still awesome.
The drama is whether he can get that magic back in time for the Chiefs to make a run.
Sure, but that’s fair.
The two-high safety look is sound strategy in part because it allows teams to basically double both Hill and Kelce. The first defender can play more aggressively and with a different risk-reward calculus knowing that a teammate has his back. The Giants took this strategy to an extreme by effectively mugging Kelce at the line of scrimmage on every snap. He couldn’t get loose.
But the other part of that is the Chiefs should have more than enough answers to beat that kind of defense. Because if Hill is occupying a corner and a safety, and Kelce is taking up a linebacker and a safety, even if the defense is only rushing four and plays everything downfield perfectly, someone is still single-covered with a quarterback who should have time and definitely has the agility to create the right angle or take easy yards with his legs.
I’m also done with this idea that what the Chiefs are really lacking is another receiving option. I mean, yes, OK, fine. That would be swell and we can roll out the old line about how much better the Chiefs would be if they took DK Metcalf instead of Mecole Hardman in the second round three years ago.
But, guys, come on. If you think your unicorn quarterback needs three potential Hall of Fame pass-catchers instead of just two then you might-could maybe not actually have a unicorn quarterback.
There should be easy yards for Josh Gordon or Pringle or Hardman, each of whom is facing lots of single-coverage with a quarterback who should have time.
Right now, the line between AFC playoff teams and non-playoff teams is between 4-3 (Steelers and Chargers) and 4-4 (Patriots, Chiefs, Browns, Broncos).
I would think you’d need at least 10 wins to get in, but that might be light. Let’s plan on 11.
If the Chiefs lost two of their next three, they would need to win all of their last six to get to 11-6.
Here’s something worth pointing out: If the Chiefs don’t have the top seed and, with that, the only available playoff bye*, I’m not sure it matters all that much whether they’re the No. 2 seed or No. 7.
* And lol they will not.
Fans take a lot of pride in Arrowhead’s noise and the organization does a lot to promote the stadium as a central part of the team’s success, but homefield advantage has been proven to be somewhat meaningless.
Reid is 49-19 at home as the Chiefs’ head coach, and 46-22 on the road. He’s lost three home playoff games and two on the road.
* The Chiefs have not played a road playoff game since 2015, which is pretty wild.
If the Chiefs worked their way into the playoffs, they would presumably have fixed some of the current problems and would definitely have beaten some combination of good teams currently remaining on their schedule. They would be the two-time AFC champions with an MVP quarterback on a revenge tour.
Tell me: Would you be pumped to play them, even in your home stadium?
So if you haven’t already, I would say it’s time to forget about the seed. The Chiefs are only 1 1/2 games out of first in the division*, but if it doesn’t come with a first-round bye, the specific seed won’t matter.
* And just two games out of the AFC’s top seed, though at least four teams ahead of them in the standings currently own tiebreakers.
I know that’s a lot of math, and a lot of hypotheticals. Apologies.
To answer your question: yes, it’s difficult to see a path to the playoffs that does not include at least two wins in the next three.
The fact that Carl Peterson is not in the Ring of Honor is such an egregious snub that it diminishes those who are deservedly in.
Peterson was gone by the time I started covering the Chiefs, so this isn’t personal, and I understand that he rubbed some people the wrong way. The ending wasn’t great.
But he and Marty Schottenheimer — and the coach did the heavy lifting, we can agree there — essentially built the popularity of the modern Chiefs. If your formative years were between 1974 or so and 1988, chances are you did not grow up caring very much about the Chiefs.
Peterson and Schottenheimer were instrumental in making sure the Chiefs did not lose another generation. They built a strong roster and consistent winner and the biggest party in the Midwest.
The Chiefs obviously didn’t win or play in a Super Bowl with Peterson, but if that’s the standard there are a lot of names that need to come down.
The Chiefs made one postseason in 17 years before Peterson and Schottenheimer were hired. They made seven of eight beginning in 1990, and along the way they changed the relationship Kansas City had with football. Last year, I put him No. 20 on a list of the 50 most influential people in Kansas City sports history.
I can accept the obvious bias I have in believing Bo Jackson is an enormous miss for the Royals Hall of Fame — I believe I’m right, but I also understand that I simply cannot be objective or credible on that.
But I do think it’s pretty clear that Peterson deserves to honored by the Chiefs, the same way Cedric Tallis deserves it with the Royals.
We’re all friends here, and you know I value honesty, so I need to tell you that I feel like I bail a LOT of clean pockets.
The cleanest example I can think of is when it’s time to do stuff around the house. My dad wasn’t exactly handy, so I didn’t know my way around tools until much later in life. You know the saying about how the best shooters are always sure the next one’s going in, even if they missed the last 12?
I’m the polar opposite. I’ve never started a project that I didn’t expect to crash, and I’ve never gotten through one without at least one mild panic attack because I’m sure I screwed up Step 3 but now I’m at Step 8 and so does that mean I have to take the whole thing apart and start all over? And, if so, would I be better off just paying the stupid tax and ordering a new one or hiring someone who knows their hands from their feet? Because if I take this thing apart I’m sure I’ll strip the screws or something.
I’ve bailed a clean pocket with my wife. Most recent example was misreading her reaction to something and canceling a date we had because I thought she said she needed to work that night. Narrator: She did NOT say that.
I’ve bailed clean pockets with my kids — got sick of Pixar on movie night, so I force-fed Home Alone when they were like 2 and 4, and holy smokes there’s some language at the beginning of that movie that you don’t want 2- and 4-year-olds to repeat for what seemed like the next three months.
Pocket presence is more difficult than it looks from the cheap seats, is the point.
Look, first of all, the high today is supposed to be 49. Yesterday it was 48. There’s been no snow — no real snow, anyway — and this weekend we’re set to crack 70.
So spare me the erroneous accusations that fall skipped out on us. We’ve been fire-pitting the bejeezus out of it at the Mellinger house, and I hope you’ve done the same. I’ve worn a hoodie something like eight days straight. Made chili. Played football with the kids. Tonight, I’m smoking salmon, which, while I’m out here spewing the takes, will be objectively and conservatively 10 times more delicious than pulled pork.
Fall is the best, but the catch is that fall knows it’s the best. So it does not care about your timeline or expectations because it knows you’ll adjust both to have the goods. That means fall might make its first appearance in September but will excuse itself to powder its nose knowing summer will come back and make you want fall even more.
Then, just when you think fall has settled in — knee-deep in football, playoff baseball, trees starting to change colors — maybe fall will start a conversation with a stranger at the bar and you know what that means: winter.
But fear not! Fall does enjoy the attention, so it’ll be back soon enough. You need to give fall its space. You need to let fall live, and do so on its own schedule.
Treat fall with respect, and in turn it will make sure you have the best times of the year.
Well, that’s not really how it works. There’s no quota or formal division of assignments like that. The Star has more journalists than any other outlet in the area, with different strengths and different areas of focus. The downtown-ballpark exploration will get coverage from lots of different people, I would imagine.
Politics reporters will get at the process and be particularly insightful as a potential vote on public financing approaches. Sports reporters will start from a point of fan experience. News reporters will want to know who’s involved, and they have strong instincts about the specific power players and levers being pulled.
All of us — reporters, editors, readers, fans, citizens — will want to know how much it will cost, how much will be sought from taxpayers, and what the alternatives will be.
I think the process of getting to those answers and others will be best done with different voices.
My read is that Royals chairman John Sherman went public with this because the pace of exploration is picking up, and that he spoke to The Star about it because he wants to be transparent and push the conversation forward.
I think he and everyone else in Kansas City sees this as closer to the beginning than the end, with lots of details still needing to be worked out, questions that need answers and conversations that will need to be had.
We’re at a truly transformative moment in Kansas City history, particularly with downtown’s development and decisions that will stick with us — good and bad — for decades.
We’re in this together, whether we want to be or not, and the conversations are going to require participation from all of us — a diversity of priorities and perspectives.
Look, I don’t really care that much about names. This is probably a failure for a sports columnist. But I’m just being honest.
My brain works in weird ways, but human history is full of franchises announcing new names or re-brands that almost always generate STRONG OPINIONS and then within a few months we’re all used to it and we move on.
Sporting Kansas City is a terrific example of this, actually.
This is probably just the American sports fan in me, but I like a mascot, and calling an entity something that ends in -ing is sort of awkward. But really, who cares about any of that when Daniel Salloi is pumping in goals and Tim Melia is suplexing folks?
All that said, I dig this re-brand more than any in recent memory. The presenting video is well done, too:
What I like about it is it makes sense. Women’s soccer is having a moment. The team is about now, and the future, with a stadium to be built by the river that in effect created Kansas City itself. Naming the team Current ties all of this and more together.
I like that they kept Kansas City in the name and crest. I like that the re-brand reflects what I see as the franchise’s reality — ambitious, prideful, forward-thinking.
I have to tell you, too: Chris and Angie Long keep stacking up the examples of backing up their big dreams and goals.
They have talked consistently about being player-first and have backed it up with first-of-its kind investments in a training facility to be built in Riverside and the planned stadium on the Berkley Riverfront. They’ve supported the players and welcomed their fans and generally operated from a place of optimism, ambition and strength.
I don’t know where this is going to lead, or end up, or even what the standard for success should be.
But if you step back and think about this from 30,000 feet, I think you’ll see a team that’s really well-positioned in its sport, its league and its city.
So, trick-or-treating is basically a group effort to herd cats. My wife took the older boy and I had the younger one and we basically just sat there reminding them to say thank you and not get hit by a car.
We left a big bowl of candy on the front step with a sign encouraging trick-or-treaters to take a couple of pieces. My wife was surprised when the bowl was empty; I was surprised it took as long as it did for some greedy little ghost to go big and take it all.
There were definitely fewer trick-or-treaters than usual in our neighborhood, and fewer houses participating. That’s understandable, and if our kids were a different age then maybe we’d have thought differently, too.
Particularly as the vaccine is set to be available for young kids, I’ve been doing some thinking about how ours have or haven’t been affected. The top line is that they haven’t lost any family members. Nobody they know has been severely ill.
But beyond that, it’s wild to me how this is just normalized in their lives. They’re 7 and 5, so they have memories before any of us had heard about COVID, but I don’t know that they really think about it as a different period of their lives. You know what I mean?
This is just their life — they wear masks to school, and by now they’re used to it. This is just how it is.
I’m looking forward to the moment that’s no longer their reality. We get these periodic reminders. Most of them go over the kids’ heads. That’s a good thing, I think.
I’ve done a little bit of shifting on this recently. I will tell you first about the shift, and then about my fundamental stance.
The shift: Do you. Do what makes you happy. We’ve all had enough taken away from us, and there are already too many people too willing to tell us what to do or how to act. So I say if flipping the switch now makes you happy, then do it. It’s your life. Let others live theirs.
My fundamental stance: Christmas gets more than its fair share of shine, and far too often it comes at the expense of Thanksgiving, which is — obviously — No. 1 in the holiday power rankings. This is a modern American travesty. Thanksgiving is low maintenance, requiring neither a costume or a gift. A lot of us put a lot of stress into the food part, but ordering Chinese is also an acceptable power move.
Thanksgiving asks only that you relax with friends or family or both. That’s not always the most stressless endeavor, so Thanksgiving also offers copious amounts of sports on television and makes clear that it’s socially acceptable to lose yourself in a game or a nap, or both.
So if you want to flip on your Christmas lights and have them on for two months — one-sixth of the year — I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, but I will ask that you still show Thanksgiving the respect it deserves. Thank you in advance.
This week I’m particularly grateful for the 363 out of the last 365 days that we’ve had functioning Internet at the house. Functioning Internet allows my wife and I to do our jobs. Functioning Internet allows the kids to watch a show. Functioning Internet controls our thermostat, our garage door and our security system. So those 363 days were really swell. I hope we can start a new streak today.
This week I’m particularly grateful for the friendships that have developed through this weird job. Just this morning, I got a nice text from an old football coach I first met something like 20 years ago. I told him — and this is true — that his name came up in a conversation recently, because I still think about certain things he said and try to apply them to my life today.
He said he can’t wait until his grandkids and my kids play against each other in Little League, and it just made my day.
This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.