Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I guess we were overdue for a Super Bowl blowout after three straight nail-biters.
In today’s SI:AM:
🦅 How the Eagles got here
😤 A team built to destroy
😞 Inside the Chiefs’ locker room
You can’t blame him, but…
Not a lot went right for the Kansas City Chiefs in their 40–22 blowout loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX on Sunday, so you can’t lay the blame on any one player. But it’s also impossible to ignore the poor play of Patrick Mahomes and how his struggles early in the game put the Chiefs in a hole too big for them to dig out of.
Mahomes’s first half was an utter disaster. He completed just six of his 14 pass attempts before halftime for a mere 33 yards, and he threw two interceptions. One of those picks was returned for a touchdown and the other was thrown while Kansas City was deep in its own end, leading to an easy Eagles touchdown.
Give the Eagles credit for making Mahomes’s life extremely difficult. Their pass rush harassed him all night long and gave him very little time to throw—despite never sending a single blitz. Mahomes was sacked six times, the most of any game in his career, and hit 11 times, the most since Week 14 of the 2018 season, his first year as a starter. The biggest problem for Mahomes wasn’t that he was ending up on his back all the time, it was that he made mistakes even when he was able to get passes off cleanly.
The first interception Mahomes threw was a pick-six to Cooper DeJean in the middle of the second quarter. The play began like so many great Mahomes plays we’ve seen throughout his career. He took the snap, rolled to his right on a bootleg designed to mitigate Philadelphia’s pressure and fired a sidearm pass on the run. But he failed to account for DeJean, who was sitting in a shallow zone and was able to jump the route. The second pick was more a result of the Eagles’ pressure. It came on a first-and-10 from the Chiefs’ 6-yard line just inside the two-minute warning. Mahomes tried to find Hollywood Brown on a crossing route but was hit as he threw and the pass was just inaccurate enough that Eagles linebacker Zack Baun could dive and intercept it.
Even though it wasn’t returned for a touchdown, the second pick was even more back-breaking than the first. It came with the Chiefs trailing 17–0 in the final two minutes of the first half. If they had been able to score to make it a 17–7 game and head into halftime down 10 points knowing they’d receive the opening kickoff in the second half, a comeback would hardly be out of the question. Instead, the Eagles took advantage of the short field and scored a touchdown two plays later to make it 24–0.
“Credit to the Eagles, man, they played better than us from start to finish,” Mahomes said. “We didn’t start how we wanted to. Obviously, the turnovers hurt. I take all the blame for that. Those early turnovers swing the momentum of the game. They capitalized on them, they scored on one and they got a touchdown immediately after. That’s 14 points that I kind of gave them, and it’s hard to come back from that when you’re in the Super Bowl.”
The two picks were the most glaring issues with Mahomes’s game, but they weren’t the only mistakes he made. Even before his first interception, he came dangerously close to having a pass picked off when he scrambled around in the backfield and forced a throw into double coverage that was nearly intercepted by C.J. Gardner-Johnson. The other poor throw that stands out came on the Chiefs’ first possession of the second quarter, when Mahomes threw a pass too low and too far away from Travis Kelce on a third-and-3 from the Kansas City 9-yard line. The incompletion led to the Chiefs’ second consecutive three-and-out and the Eagles took advantage of the good field position to score a field goal.
Even at age 29, Mahomes has already secured his status as an all-time great, not just because he won three Super Bowls in a five-year span, but also because of his awe-inspiring combination of technical excellence and improvisational brilliance. He’s the best quarterback of his generation and one of the greatest of all time. That makes the Eagles’ ability to limit him on Sunday all the more impressive. But his lousy Super Bowl also came at the end of what was a surprisingly pedestrian season for Mahomes. He threw for 3,928 yards, seventh in the league and his fewest in any season of his career, and 26 touchdowns, tied with 2019 (when he missed two games with a knee injury) for the fewest of his career.
For the second straight year, the Chiefs had a middling offense buoyed by an elite defense. Last season it seemed like the issue with Kansas City’s offense was the lack of quality targets for Mahomes to throw to, so the team went out during the offseason and added several receivers. It drafted Xavier Worthy in the first round, signed Brown in free agency and traded for DeAndre Hopkins during the season. But the Chiefs had a different problem this season: the offensive line. Mahomes had less time to throw this season (2.3 seconds on average) than in any other season, and he was sacked a career-worst 36 times.
The Eagles took full advantage of that weakness on Sunday, smothering Mahomes throughout the game. It would have taken a perfect game from Mahomes to lead a productive offense in the face of that kind of pressure, and that’s not what he gave his team. Under other circumstances, against an inferior team, the Chiefs may have been able to withstand Mahomes’s two brutal picks. But given how thoroughly dominant the Eagles were, Mahomes’s early mistakes were enough to sink the Chiefs and deny him his fourth ring.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- We’ve got you covered with all sorts of Super Bowl coverage, starting with Greg Bishop’s big-picture look at the 21 moments that led to the Eagles’ championship.
- Albert Breer looked at how the Eagles spent years building the foundation of this championship team.
- Breer’s final Takeaways column of the season opens with a look at the Chiefs’ imperfections.
- Philadelphia’s defense, Conor Orr writes, was built to destroy opponents. And that’s exactly what it did.
- Orr was also in the Eagles’ locker room as they celebrated their victory and described the jubilant scene there. Matt Verderame, meanwhile, was down the hall in a somber Chiefs locker room.
- Is it too early to look forward to next season? Orr made one bold prediction for each NFL team’s 2025 season.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Patrick Mahomes Didn’t Do the Chiefs Any Favors.
