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Kansas City Chiefs
Game on the line. Ball in Patrick Mahomes’s hands. Helpless opponent on the other sideline, without much of a prayer of getting a different result than the rest of the Chiefs’ victims.
So it was Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills, 32–29. Mahomes outgunned Josh Allen, again, in the playoffs, and the Chiefs are going to their fifth Super Bowl in six years, which is a first. It also got them back to the biggest stage in sports after winning back-to-back Super Bowls, which is another first, and gives them a shot at an unprecedented three-peat in two weeks.
And yes, this one was about the transcendent greatness of Mahomes.
But to me, it was also about a team that’s come to handle the biggest moments, across the board, just like he does—without fear or any doubt that the right result is coming.
“No doubt,” says All-Pro corner Trent McDuffie, in a quiet moment by his locker. “Everybody around here will tell you when it’s a tie game, at the end of the game, if Pat has the ball, there’s nobody believing that he won’t get the job done. It’s been great to be on the opposite side and watch, but also learn about how they do their things. Being able to practice against Pat and Travis [Kelce] and pick their brain, it’s helped our defense so much.
“You can see the confidence flowing out of everybody.”
In the biggest moments Sunday, it was obvious, and it was more than just Mahomes.
It was George Karlaftis getting home on a blitz on fourth-and-5 to get the ball back right after the two-minute warning. It was Isiah Pacheco hauling in a Mahomes throw to the flat to move the sticks with 1:50 left. It was the receivers creating traffic in front of Terrel Bernard on the final significant play, so the Bills’ linebacker couldn’t get to the flat to cover Samaje Perine fast enough, carrying out the man-beating concept perfectly.
But more than just that, it was the Chiefs’ coaches having faith in the players to pull those things off. Make no mistake, the overload blitz call on fourth down, and then the two throws on the final possession, are gambles by coaches who are cool putting the game in their guys’ hands, worst-case-scenario be damned.
“[Andy Reid] trusts us,” Mahomes told me, an hour or so after the game, in a corner near the tunnel at Arrowhead. “That’s how we’ve built this thing that we’ve built. It’s all about trusting the players to go out and make the plays. We’re conservative in certain moments, we play by the tempo of the game and then we decide. It’s a lot of trust on offense, defense and special teams. That’s what makes us so great, is it’s not just one guy, it’s everybody.”
That may run contrary to how some—those people who assign everything, good or back, to the quarterback—see it. But Mahomes wasn’t just being self-deprecating. There’s a lot of truth in the idea that he’s far from the only player Reid and his staff have full faith in.
And that starts with the fourth down, on a call that required four-time champion defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo to trust his pass rushers to get home. The idea was to show the pressure, and make Allen think the Chiefs were coming with a zero blitz and man coverage, then send a weak-wide overload blitz and drop into zone. The trouble was that Allen had a guy in motion, giving in the indicator the Chiefs were in zone, so if the rush didn’t arrive at Allen fast enough, the Chiefs may have been cooked.
But McDuffie and Justin Reid timed their blitz perfectly, sending the Bills’ line into chaos and freeing Karlaftis to force a fallaway throw that Allen nearly completed anyway. That he didn’t was a testament to the call, yes, and also the players who made it work.
“I say all the time, Spags is like a pitcher always setting up his curveball,” says linebacker Nick Bolton. “Throughout the game, we’re trying to present different things, see what they’re going to do. It was one of these critical downs, we dialed up the pressure and got home.”
Then, it was the offense’s turn. And just as the coaches put the game in the hands of Karlaftis, Reid and McDuffie on defense moments earlier, Reid and OC Matt Nagy were about to do the same sorts of things with their offense.
Going into the week, the coaches told Mahomes there’d be situations where he’d be best off running the ball, and to not be afraid to go that way on called pass plays that had a built-in run option. Sure enough, he wound up with, excluding kneeldowns, 45 yards rushing and two touchdowns on nine carries. “They play man a lot of the time,” Mahomes told me, “The quarterback can run, and I was able to see that.”
And they’d trust him to see it again—or not see it that way, as the case wound up being—when it mattered most.
The Chiefs got the ball back with 1:54 left after the turnover on downs. Conventional wisdom would tell a coach to run three straight times, make the defense burn its timeouts, and punt it away if you don’t get the yardage needed. But conventional wisdom doesn’t have Mahomes at quarterback.
So after some discussion on the sideline while the defense was getting the stop the Chiefs needed, Reid called a sprint right on second-and-9. Mahomes had the option to run. This time, instead, he threw the ball into the right flat, and Pacheco picked up the first down.
The problem? He went out of bounds, and that left the Bills with another glimmer of hope.
Which is when Mahomes said to his teammates in the huddle, per JuJu Smith-Schuster: “First down here, win the game.” Mahomes, clearly, had no interest in playing to milk the clock. And Reid showed he didn’t either. After consecutive runs stripped Buffalo of its timeouts, the Chiefs were in third-and-9. Reid and Nagy already had a third-down call ready, which they’d discussed early in the week. The ball would again be in Mahomes’s hands.
The Chiefs were counting on more man coverage, lining up three receivers to Mahomes’s left, then running them across to his right, which would force the linebacker (Bernard in this case) to sort through a mess of guys to get to the flat to cover the back, Perine, leaking out.
“We wanted to be a little closer [to the first down] to run that play, but I said, ,” Mahomes said. “If it’s not there, I’ll take the sack, punt and let the defense have it with about 25 seconds left. When you’ve been in a lot of games, you understand the process of it. That’s what winners do. We’re good about the time management and the clock management. That’s something we go over the night before the game.”
And just like they drew it up, Bernard got lost amid the three receivers and three guys covering them, was late to get to Perine, and Perine did the rest.
It sounds simple, of course, but it’s not. It’s the coaches not thinking, but that their players aren’t going to foul things up and put the team in a bad spot. It’s Mahomes, for sure. “We put the ball in his hands at that moment,” Nagy told me. “You almost have to when you have a guy like that.” It’s also Perine, Pacheco and the line, just like it was Karflaftis, Reid and McDuffie a few minutes earlier on defense.
“There is a sense of, ,” GM Brett Veach says. “We’re going to be in those situations. You just feel confident that the guys are going to handle the situation. When it matters the most, our players come through. It’s the way we practice, the way we prepare. It’s what’s in the players’ DNA.”
But what really brings it to life is when Spagnuolo chooses to play coverage on fourth-and-5, or when Reid and Nagy decide not to close down shop late and run the ball.
The players feel empowered by that. As they should, based on the results.
“There’s a ton of trust, the coaching staff to the players,” Mahomes says. “We prepare ourselves for these moments. Coach Reid, we go over these plays each week. We go over the plays we like and what we think we can go with in certain situations. … Coach Reid has a lot of trust in us, so if we’re going to go down, he’s going to go down fighting. That’s the mantra of our team.”
It’s more than a mantra, though. It’s really become who the Chiefs are.
And why, this time of year, they’re almost impossible to beat.
