For first time in Mahomes era, Chiefs have real doubts to dispel after loss to Eagles
Amid another comedy of errors, including some slapstick stuff in their once-vaunted passing game, the Chiefs again wilted in the second half on Monday night to fall 21-17 to visiting Philadelphia.
From a pure results standpoint, there could hardly be any less shame than in losing a narrow game to the Eagles, who at 9-1 have the best record in the NFL and could well be its best team for the long haul, too.
And, yes, it was still just one game, and we’ve seen this movie before, where the Chiefs (6-4 in 2019 and 7-3 now) push off from right about here and go win a Super Bowl.
But there was something more to this loss, too, and not just because the Chiefs went from holding the top seed in the AFC to falling a half-game behind Baltimore into a four-way tie for second place.
Albeit against a terrific team, this defeat reaffirmed their shortcomings and vulnerabilities as quite real and further demystified the X-Factor mojo that’s been such a part of the Patrick Mahomes Era.
While their core issue absolutely is the offense, which for long stretches looks disjointed because of penalties, dropped passes, turnovers and astounding miscommunications between Mahomes and his receivers, this crossroads is about something more.
Remember back in the day when the Mahomes-led Chiefs would be trailing and get the ball back at, say, their own 9-yard line with 2 minutes, 49 seconds left and you’d actually expect them to conjure the magic to win?
That wasn’t what it felt like on Monday, though, was it?
Even when Mahomes feathered a highly catchable pass to a stunningly open Marquez Valdes-Scantling for what would have been a go-ahead 51-yard touchdown, it really seemed like no surprise when MVS failed to hold on to it.
So we’ve entered into a different phase and a different sort of challenge for the Andy Reid/Mahomes-led Chiefs.
A stage when not only are the Chiefs the hunted but also no longer radiate that certain something extra that so often has rendered others ready to droop.
Look, this hardly means they’re doomed. It may not even be time to reset expectations, exactly.
But it’s certainly time to re-calibrate the perception of where they are: Their path ahead will be thornier than ever and require a revamped navigation system — both in terms of what this team’s strengths are and how the coaching staff plays to them.
For most of the last five-plus seasons, the burden of proof largely had been on others to demonstrate they could derail a Chiefs team that has played in three of the last four Super Bowls and played host to five straight AFC Championship Games.
Now that’s flipped: The onus is on the Chiefs to reboot and prove that this upside-down version of their recent past — a team being lugged by its defense hoping the offense improves down the stretch — still has the capacity to make crucial adjustments and repairs.
Because there’s no more rationalizing that this season’s hiccups are a blip or maybe just a fleeting trend.
Now, they look like a full-blown syndrome, with an offense that looks like a mere facade of its former self making for a team whose aura of invincibility has faded.
Now, so much of what you might have started taking for granted simply no longer is the case.
In the Chiefs’ 81 regular-season games in Mahomes’ first five seasons, for instance, they averaged 30.3 points a game.
This season, they’re managing 22.5 a game … and would be undefeated if they’d mustered 25 in their losses.
The team we knew for so many epic comebacks has scored an NFL-low 5.3 points a game in second halves and has one — one — fourth-quarter touchdown in 10 games.
Under Reid, they had been 4-0 against the Eagles, his former team. For that matter, this comes just weeks after their 16-game winning streak over Denver was snuffed out.
Most to the point, though, the loss came after all that self-scouting and healing and supposed tweaking and fixing to be carried out during not just a bye week but with a Reid bye week and all is presumed sorcery: Entering the game on Monday, after all, Reid had been 29-4 (including playoffs) in games after a bye.
But with five dropped passes, seven penalties, turnovers by Mahomes and a reckless version of Travis Kelce and zero points in the second half for a third straight week, you hardly would have known the Chiefs had 15 days to prepare for this game.
Seeking improvement after about any game in Mahomes’ two-time MVP and two-time Super Bowl MVP career, he’d be left contemplating his and the offense’s mistakes after a game.
On Monday, he was relegated to making the opposite point.
“There’s positives you can find,” he said. “I’ll watch film and find them tomorrow.”
What he’ll find is ongoing good news/bad news for the Chiefs’ offense. So many of their troubles are self-inflicted. Which means they’re completely capable of fixing them.
But … they haven’t yet, through 10 games and 11 weeks of the season and coming off a bye.
If not by now, the question grows, when?
The sustaining and optimistic side of this is that the defense, which had five sacks (in the first half) and held the Eagles to 238 yards, is no fluke. It’s good enough, in fact, that the Chiefs can contend for another title if the offense gets right.
Or at least gets to a more right version of what this particular group can be.
Unless and until it shows that, though, we’re at a new frontier: For the first time since Mahomes took over as QB1, the Chiefs have legitimate doubts to dispel.