KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The week begins with some film of the most recently played game, and Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes often embarks on that process on the flight home.
It allows him to more quickly move to tape of the upcoming opponent, which amounts to a collection of five or six relevant games. If that includes a recent matchup with the Chiefs, hey, even better.
Usually.
On occasion, though, that is the most agonizing piece of the routine. Like, say, this week.
Early Monday, when Mahomes picked up the tablet and flipped on his previous game against the Bengals — who the Chiefs will visit again Sunday afternoon — the review was initially succinct.
“I played terrible in the second half,” he said.
We already knew that. Known it since January. You didn’t need to flip on the tape to see it, but, man, the tape isn’t pretty — that AFC Championship Game is as bad we’ve seen Mahomes, or at least as much as we’ve seen the gravity of a moment get to him.
But what we couldn’t have known then — and what prompted concern and should have prompted concern — is the more important piece. The piece that remains relevant in 2022.
The response.
See, for the longest time, there has been an underlying anticipation for something, anything, to make Mahomes imperfect — whether it be the cover-2, losing Tyreek Hill or playing the worst half of football of his life at one of the most inopportune times. I’ll admit it’s intriguing in the moment. But each item, in retrospect, checks the same box.
A short-term problem.
Followed by the same long-term solution: Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid.
A good place to start.
To be fair, this particular example sure seemed different. After all, Mahomes himself was the short-term problem against the Bengals. Remember? Cincinnati got him that day, using a combination of three-man rushes and man-to-man coverage. To put it bluntly, Mahomes looked spooked by the way it was unfolding, the best player in the world paralyzed to beat it.
What next? How would he get back to being, well, the same Patrick Mahomes again? We’ll get to that.
But first we have to understand that he’s actually not the same Patrick Mahomes.
He’s been better.
Aside from all of the year-over-year statistical improvement — yards, touchdowns, interception rate, passer rating QBR, yards per attempt and the like — he’s doing it subtracted one of the best wide receivers in the game, and he’s often doing it against defenses that resemble the one that shut him down.
What, you think a rematch with the Bengals will be the first time a defense presents those same looks? As if every other team in the league wouldn’t try to produce a carbon copy of the scheme that got him?
A year later, Mahomes is blitzed less frequently than any quarterback other than, ironically, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. And the Chiefs see more man coverage than any team in football.
They’re all trying to replicate how the Bengals turned Mahomes into a quarterback too shy to pull the trigger, just putting their own spins on it.
But none can replicate the success the Bengals had that day. Mahomes is rated as the second-best quarterback in football when the defense drops all of its defensive backs and linebackers into coverage, per Pro Football Focus. He leads the league in yards and touchdowns overall, and even with three wide receivers missing time with injuries, he has thrown for 320-plus yards in six straight games, the longest streak in the NFL in a decade.
Mahomes will tell you the Chiefs didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time practicing against the Bengals’ scheme, so if you’re thinking they found some sort of magical potion against it, well, that ain’t it. Which is a telling chapter of the story. We’re left no choice but to believe they concluded the problem was in individual execution, not strategy, and I rarely say it, but that individual was No. 15.
The riddle is how did he get past it? How did that one loss not spill into the start of 2022?
He owned it. That’s Part I.
He started small. Like the most finite details he could find.
He had gone back and watched the game pretty immediately, and noticed his fundamentals had gone out of whack as things soured, like a pitcher cruising to a no-hitter and suddenly losing his mechanics after the seventh-inning stretch.
“I was really good in the first half with my fundamentals, and as we weren’t having success as an offense, my fundamentals got worse and worse,” he said.
That’s been an emphasis every game, and he relies on his new quarterbacks coach (and also his former quarterbacks coach) Matt Nagy and teammates like Chad Henne to spot any inconsistencies.
The details.
At the onset of training camp — within just a few hours actually — Chiefs coach Andy Reid had already noticed the horror of a past season would not be the concerns of the next. As he put it, “I’d tell you, every day, the ‘Be Great’ is back right there,” referencing a phrase Mahomes preaches to teammates throughout a practice, emphasizing the importance of every snap.
And the reason Reid brought up that point, mind you, is because he, too, was watching for signs indicating whether or not that Bengals loss would linger.
It hasn’t in the results.
But — and there is a but in all of this — there is a different vibe to this one Sunday, as though one hurdle remains.
Beating the team responsible. That’s the last item on this checklist.
Because even as the evidence has told the Chiefs they have moved on — from the scheme adaptation to their place atop the AFC standings — the mind lags behind. And I don’t mean mine.
Safety Justin Reid signed with the Chiefs in the offseason, and said after arriving to Kansas City, “there were three games the guys were talking about on the calendar — the Bills being one, Tennessee being another and most of all Cincinnati being the other one.”
Andy Reid rarely acknowledges that any one of the 17 is more important than another, and even he nearly committed to the thought that this one means a little more.
Don’t think for a minute they’ve erased that game from memory. There will be some extra juice Sunday, and history suggests this quarterback performs pretty well in those sorts of conditions.
They’ve moved on statistically. They’re in the driver’s seat for the No. 1 seed in the AFC with six games to play.
But have they moved on in their minds?
Here’s where that intrigue, at least in the moment, remains present.
