Considering what the Chiefs conjured with 13 seconds left against Buffalo last postseason, and any number of other tales to astonish from the Mahomes Era, staring at a four-point deficit with 1 minute, 46 seconds left against the Chargers on Sunday night at SoFi Stadium might have seemed like ho-hum stuff.
A routine emergency, if you will, one that even coach Andy Reid would say “seemed like an eternity” left after the Chargers had taken the lead on Justin Herbert’s 6-yard touchdown to Joshua Palmer.
Hard-wired and girded for these sorts of challenges as the Chiefs have become, though, this appeared to be a different tier of equation for Mahomes to solve. After all, the Chiefs were down three prime targets.
Receiver Mecole Hardman was on injured reserve with an abdomen illness and, feeling like plenty of other Chiefs fans along the way, hurling a remote control through his TV; JuJu Smith-Schuster was ruled out in the concussion protocol. And recently acquired Kadarius Toney, after a pivotal game last week, suffered a hamstring injury on Sunday.
If that intensified your anxiety, though, it didn’t faze Mahomes or anyone around him in any perceptible way as the Chiefs (8-2) rallied to a 30-27 victory. In the process, they took a three-game lead in the AFC West and held on to the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
To hear Mahomes tell it, there was no sense of even feeling rushed. Or even pause to consider who they were without. And that permeates everyone around him.
“He calms everything down,” Reid said … paradoxical as that might be about the most exciting player we’ve ever been privileged to watch.
The ripples of that made for what Mahomes called a tangible mindset of, “ ‘Let’s just do it.’ There was no doubt we were going to go down there and score. No doubt we were going to make it happen.”
Shazam, they went 75 yards on six plays in 1:15 — so fast Reid fretted they left the Chargers too much time — and scored the game-winning points with harmonic justice: a 17-yard TD pass from Mahomes to Travis Kelce.
On the play, Kelce went over 100 yards for the 33rd time in his career to set the career record for tight ends (one more than Rob Gronkowski, two more than Tony Gonzalez).
But it wasn’t just that that stat backed Mahomes’ assertion that Kelce is the greatest tight end in history. Or that it was Kelce’s third touchdown of the game and echoed his effort here last year (when he scored the game-winning touchdown in overtime among his 10 catches for 191 yards). And that it came against star safety Derwin James, whom Kelce said had “got the better of me for the majority of the game.”
It was that as easy as Mahomes and Co. made it look, what the Chiefs pulled off in that drive was particularly preposterous under the circumstances.
Not that you’d know it from how they glided down the field, with an 18-yard pass to Marquez Valdes-Scantling and a holding penalty on James. And a 13-yard pass from Mahomes to rookie Skyy Moore (his fifth catch of the day after entering the game with seven all season), and a 16-yard Mahomes scramble.
Punctuated by the spectacle that is Mahomes-to-Kelce, yet again.
“You’d like it to last forever, but these guys grow old, and you know it’s not (going to last forever),” Reid said. “So what I do is I try to enjoy every minute of it, every play. And their chemistry is ridiculous. You know coming into this game that they had a plan for (Kelce), and he and Pat were able to work through it and make some nice things happen.”
Even when there is scant doubt that Kelce would be Mahomes’ go-to guy in the crucible. All the more so with the Chiefs so depleted.
All of that tells you why Kelce rifled the ball into the corner of the end zone in celebration after his drag across the field.
“To be able to persevere through that, man, it’s like a ticking time bomb,” Kelce said. “Once you get into the end zone, man, you just explode.”
As for where the ball ended up, Kelce said, “Sorry if I hit somebody. I don’t have a whole lot of accuracy with (my arm). That’s why I moved to tight end.”
Good thing. And to have his time with the Chiefs coincide with the dawning of Mahomes, and what they create together, is one of the best things that ever happened to this franchise.
Because as much as Mahomes calms everyone else, it’s also true that Kelce does the same for Mahomes.
While his chemistry with MVS, Moore and Justin Watson remain works in progress, Mahomes certainly has enough of a baseline of faith in them that he could follow his reads to lead them to plays.
So down three guys at the end of the game …
“I try not to let it affect me,” he said.
Then he laughed and reminded that he had joked during the week that he goes through all the reads … “unless Kelc is manned up, (then) I throw him the ball.”
Actually, though …
“No, I’m not joking at all …” he said.
In those cases, he added, “I’m going to give my guy a chance. Because I know how special he is.”
And how special they are together.
Enough to make it look routine even in extenuating circumstances.
