How Patrick Mahomes’ career-low performance riffed off a key Chiefs breakthrough
Andy Reid had a 17-3 record after bye weeks. His Chiefs teams had won 24 of their last 27 against the rest of the AFC West, verging on a cartoonish Harlem Globetrotters-Washington Generals type dominance.
Moreover, Reid’s Chiefs had been 11-2 against Oakland — including beating the Raiders by an aggregate score of 63-13 in their previous two meetings.
With every game telling a tale of its own, sometimes trends like that prove deceptive or irrelevant. But on Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium, those indicators were downright prophetic in a 40-9 Chiefs victory that in a certain way was played completely to form.
If, that is, you figured on quarterback Patrick Mahomes looking like a mortal —for a second straight game! — and this newfangled defense paving the way with Tyrann Mathieu’s interception setting up one touchdown and Juan Thornhill’s 46-yard TD return delivered one series after his key fourth-and-1 stop.
Meanwhile, Mahomes threw for a career-low 175 yards while completing just 15 of 29 passes. He was lucky to have one interception dropped and another overturned by a replay ruling that Raiders coach Jon Gruden attributed to “The Wizard of Oz.”
Which is what you might call a nitpicking, paranoid first-world problem … but only if you’re willing to dignify the matter that much when it comes to the reigning NFL most valuable player and revolutionary force.
“There were enough good things … Everything’s not going to be perfect,” Reid said, later smiling but a bit defensively adding, “If we start critiquing a couple bad ones, then we’re missing out on some pretty good ones.”
To be sure, Mahomes wasn’t at his best. And the offense at times was out of the sync and rhythm and sheer mojo it normally enjoys.
But there were reasons for that, including not just that Mahomes is a human being but blustery winds ... and a precious new dynamic at play, one seldom if at all seen in the Mahomes Era.
We’ve become conditioned to the notion that the winning formula for the Chiefs is Mahomes’ throwing for unfathomable yardage and infinite touchdowns by occasionally unconventional methods … and then just hoping that’s enough to outscore the other guys going up against their porous defense.
But there are three phases of the game, let’s remember. In a game that Reid called “a pure team win,” the Chiefs had a penalty-free performance (a lone flag was offset by an Oakland penalty on the same play) for just the third time in franchise history and first since 1974.
And a winning formula is one that riffs off and complements and reacts in kind to each phase of the game.
In this case, defense and special teams tilted the field to help give the Chiefs a 21-0 halftime lead. That made their second-half offensive mission more about running clock and not making mistakes than anything else, especially with New England up next and no reason to show anything exotic.
As much as you can “grind out” a 40-9 win, that’s what this became.
“You’ve seen it week by week, the defense getting better; the special teams made great plays today,” Mahomes said. “And then offensively, we’re just playing in the flow of the game. We’ve been in every type of football game, it seems like now. And just trying to find ways to win each and every game because every game flows different.
“And I feel like today it was about the defense — let the defense eat and us taking the opportunity to score when we can.”
Mahomes had his moments, too, including five connections for 90 yards to Travis Kelce and a 13-yard touchdown run that he playfully said was on Tyreek Hill for running the wrong route.
“He is something else, that guy,” Gruden said of Mahomes. “He makes a lot of plays when there is nothing there. He also doesn’t miss many when there are plays to be made.”
So the takeaway from Sunday isn’t that Mahomes threw for 175 yards one game after establishing his career-low of 182 yards in a 24-17 win over the Chargers in Mexico City.
It’s that the Chiefs are 8-4 entering the defining part of their season. And they’re showing signs of becoming the more complete team you hoped they might be when they blew up their wretched defense after last season ended with a 37-31 overtime loss to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game.
Now we’ll see how that all aligns and meshes and works together in this week’s meeting with the Patriots, which is perhaps the undercard to a postseason showdown.
“I think every single game is different,” Mahomes said.
Even, it turns out, when it’s Reid coaching after a bye week in an AFC West game against the Raiders.
Same result, yes, but a different methodology, in this case.
And a preferable one, at that, for a team striving to be remembered for more than just Mahomes.
This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 9:15 PM.