Kansas City Chiefs WR Mecole Hardman made an appearance on ESPN’s “First Take” on Thursday. He had an opportunity to reflect on some things that happened to the Chiefs’ offense during the 2022 NFL season, share an outlook for the future and talk about the upcoming Super Bowl LVI matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals.
Stephen A. Smith was pretty blunt with his first line of questioning: “What the hell happened in the AFC championship game?”
Hardman feels that the offense should carry the blame for the loss to the Bengals in the AFC title game.
“Listen, we started off great,” Hardman responded. “The first half was cool. Then, in the second half, we just didn’t score. (We) put out defense in bad situations and you know that high-powered offense in Cincinnati, you can’t stop them forever. So, I think it was just on (offense) we had to score in the second half and we didn’t.”
Smith continued to ask about the offense. He wondered why the team didn’t look as explosive at times in 2021 as they had in years past. Hardman felt a lot of it had to do with the way that defenses have adjusted when playing against Kansas City.
“I think it comes with defenses changing their schemes up,” Hardman said. “Just giving different looks, figuring things out that they give us problems. I think Tampa Bay kind of started that last year in the Super Bowl with the kind of defense that they played. I think it was like the adjustment factor of like trying to figure out the different looks and all the different things that defenses were throwing at us. There were times when we just couldn’t get anything going, but when we started figuring things out that’s when we started rolling. As you know, we were on an eight-game winning streak. That’s when things started rolling in once we started figuring everything out.”
Molly Qerim asked Hardman about the future and what the Chiefs need to do to get themselves back on the right track in 2022.
“First, we’ve got to figure out the team, make sure we get the right pieces back,” Hardman said. “We’ve got a couple of guys we need to sign, a couple of guys we need to extend and everything. After that we get all the pieces together, just get to training camp and get right. It shouldn’t be too hard. We know how to do what we’ve got to do and just take it one game at a time.”
As for the upcoming matchup in Super Bowl LVI, Hardman was a bit conflicted. On one hand, he wants to root for the AFC conference, but on the other hand, his UGA ties make it hard to root against Rams QB Matthew Stafford. In the end, he relied on an old football adage to make his pick.
“They say defense wins championships and LA definitely has a dominant defense.”
