The Chiefs lost the Super Bowl at the line of scrimmage.
Football is rarely this simple, and even here we can get into the weeds about dropped passes, mental mistakes, a few bad calls and a lack of emotional discipline. But, mostly, the Chiefs lost to — got blown out by — the Bucs in Super Bowl LV because they could not pressure Tom Brady and they could not keep the Bucs from pressuring Patrick Mahomes.
At least for now we will focus on the Chiefs’ blocking. This team will rise and fall with Mahomes, who has shown he will rise if given even a decent amount of time.
The Chiefs’ inability to protect him in the Super Bowl, combined with the offensive line’s short- and long-term outlook being rocked by injuries, creates the team’s most urgent area of concern in the goal of maximizing both Mahomes’ talent and the organization’s continued championship chase.
The solution is part strategy and part in-house, but must also include improvements from the outside.
Consider this: Mahomes was pressured on 29 of 56 dropbacks despite being blitzed just six times, according to Pro Football Focus, and covered an astounding 497 yards scrambling away from that pressure, according to Next Gen Stats.
Mahomes has made us believe nothing is impossible. But he met his limit against the Bucs. The offensive line just didn’t give the Chiefs a chance.
He hinted at those problems immediately after the game, but on Monday he took more of the blame.
“There were some plays where I got the line going in the wrong direction,” he said. “At the end of the day we just didn’t execute. That’s the biggest thing. A lot of times it gets put on that O-line because I’m scrambling around, but if we’re not executing as far as me making the right reads, getting the ball out of my hand to the receivers on time, then nothing’s going to work.
“(The line gets) that blame sometimes, but sometimes it’s not deserved, because a lot of it is on me and people just don’t see it that way.”
The line got trucked, and repeatedly. The Chiefs did some chips with backs or tight ends on the Bucs’ rushers, but for the most part they relied on five-man protections.
This is football’s cat-and-mouse game, a bet by the Chiefs that an extra receiver will cause more problems for the defense than an extra blocker will protect.
“We want to be ourselves,” Mahomes said. “We really hadn’t been really stopped with what we had been doing all year long. Obviously we gave chips, and we gave little extra-protection hits and stuff like that. But at the end of the day we want to use our speed and use what we’ve been doing.”
Mahomes is not making stuff up, but he’s also being a good teammate by claiming blame. Because while he is undoubtedly being honest about missing some protection calls, part of what he’s not saying is that he erases far more problems for the line than he creates.
The NFL moves fast, so even with the loss still fresh this is not about litigating the problems of the Super Bowl.
