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HOW THE CHIEFS RECLAIMED THE TITLE IN 2022–23

In Chiefs’ romp over Cardinals, even Patrick Mahomes says KC defense ‘set the tempo’

BY VAHE GREGORIAN

GLENDALE, Ariz. — The most dazzling development on Sunday at State Farm Stadium was Patrick Mahomes, ho-hum, throwing for five touchdowns and 360 yards in his first game with a radically revamped wide receiver corps in the wake of the Tyreek Hill trade.

The most confounding scene was the wacky twist in the kicking game after Harrison Butker suffered a first-half ankle injury that led to the bullpen call for safety Justin Reid, who just weeks removed from being a kicking novelty act acquitted himself well by making one of two PATs, largely kicking off well and even getting in on a return tackle.

That made for plenty of mesmerizing stuff in the Chiefs’ 44-21 clobbering of the Cardinals in their NFL opener.

Enough to obscure perhaps the most pleasant and surprising display of the day: a cohesive, rapid-closing, sure-tackling and otherwise dynamic defense that muzzled the Cardinals on

the way to a 37-7 lead before receding in what defensive tackle Chris Jones correctly labeled “garbage time.”

“They kicked our (gluteus),” Arizona quarterback Kyler Murray said to open his postgame news conference.

More delicately, Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury said, “They stymied us, and we didn’t get in a rhythm.”

Not bad for what Jones rated a “C-plus” and “OK” defensive effort, in part because he was chafed by the Cardinals scoring two fourth-quarter touchdowns and in part because he was cognizant of missed opportunities (including his early would-be sack of Murray).

“But we got to him,” Jones said. “We affected him in multiple ways.”

And affected the game in multiple ways, too, including a key stop late in the first half that we’ll come back to.

With five new starters, not to mention a herd

of other newcomers in the rotation, the Chiefs held the Cardinals to 282 yards overall.

That sum, scratched out in the waning seconds, was just four more yards allowed than the defense’s best effort all last season and was fundamental to a comprehensive win in more ways than you might immediately think.

“They set the tempo; I think that’s the biggest thing,” Mahomes said, later somewhat tellingly noting the impact that has on the offense. “When you play good complementary football, the (opposing) defense can’t account for what we’re going to do. They don’t know if we’re going to run or pass because our defense is playing well.”

This fine first impression will be tested in an entirely different way on Thursday, of course, when the Chiefs play host to Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers.

And this result said something about the Cardinals, as well, including that they were depleted by injuries and the DeAndre Hopkins suspension.

OPPOSITE: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes throws against the Arizona Cardinals during the first half in Glendale, Ariz. MATT YORK / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Just the same, the stats and the eye test suggested a meaningful development too, especially given the typical early struggles of defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s units.

Last season, for example, the Chiefs surrendered 29 points in the opener on the way to yielding a stunning 163 over the first five games. And the numbers were well-amplified by the plague of bad tackling, communication issues and speed deficiencies.

But don’t take it from us.

“We have a bad history of starting slow and tackling poorly at the beginning of the season,” said safety Juan Thornhill, who had one of the highlights of the game with a lunging pass breakup on the sideline.

Or as Jones put it: “We usually started the year off with 12 or 16 missed tackles in the first game (while) everybody (is) getting accustomed.”

That hardly was the case Sunday, at least not before film reviews. And Jones and Thornhill both attributed that to a renewed emphasis on tackling drills and running to the ball this camp. Meanwhile, Thornhill also pointed to something easily said and harder done: “Staying together and just playing fast.”

It’s unclear how much of that was from simplification of Spagnuolo’s considerable set of schemes.

Justin Reid would say after the game that

the entire playbook was at their disposal, but Thornhill seemed to see it differently:

Spagnuolo “just wanted us to play fast,” he said. “That was the main thing. Didn’t put too much on our plate. Just put us out there and allow us to play real fast.”

They sure started fast, too.

After Mahomes drove the Chiefs the length of the field and hit Travis Kelce for a 9-yard touchdown pass on the opening drive, the defense set about swamping Murray.

A play after Jones almost instantly flushed him out of the pocket, cornerback L’Jarius Sneed sacked him to force a punt. Moments later, the Chiefs were up 14-0.

The Cardinals retaliated with their only meaningful touchdown of the day, but the Chiefs immediately scored again. Soon came the critical stand of the game.

After JuJu Smith-Schuster fumbled and the Cardinals recovered at the Kansas City 42 with just under a minute left in the half, the Cardinals faced fourth and 2 at the 34.

Convert and possibly get into the end zone, then receiving the second-half kickoff, and it was game back on.

But rookie George Karlaftis quickly got in Murray’s grill and forced him to essentially throw the ball away.

Then when the defense relegated Arizona

SEPT. 11, 2022

488 TOTAL YARDS

3 SACKS COMPLETED

to punting to open the second half, the Chiefs promptly made it 30-7 to effectively put it away.

Not that the late Arizona scores didn’t matter. Especially to Jones, who was demonstrably upset.

“We’ve got to set that tone, man,” he said. “This is a new defense, and it’s about setting a standard.”

It’s also about maintaining it as the competition improves, which it will drastically in just a few days.

But at least there’s traction and a template to work with from here. That’s something that’s been hard to find early for the Chiefs … and something that stood out even among the more flashy elements of the game Sunday.

OPPOSITE: Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce catches a pass for a touchdown against Arizona Cardinals linebacker Isaiah Simmons. ROSS D. FRANKLIN / ASSOCIATED PRESS

How the Titans delivered the Chiefs a warning … but also did them a favor

BY SAM MCDOWELL

The Chiefs have a mostly new collection of talent surrounding the quarterback this year, which is not something you’re hearing for the first time, but midway into its introductory season, teams haven’t been quite sure what to do with it.

That tends to have a reverberation effect. Just this month, head coach Andy Reid, quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce each explained how it’s left the Chiefs wondering exactly what an opposing defense might do any given week.

Well, wonder no more.

The Chiefs beat the Titans 20-17 in an overtime game Sunday too ugly for primetime, but the visitors from Nashville delivered a bit of a blueprint, and you can bet the rest of the league will be doing their damnedest to produce its carbon copy.

The Titans nearly won in Arrowhead Stadium with a quarterback who completed five passes and a group of wide receivers who caught none. They won up front — dominated up front — and needed only four guys to do it. Rather than out-manning the Chiefs with speed at the line, they flat-out overpowered them in both the pass and the run game, coupling it with man-to-man coverage in the back end.

The result? They pressured Mahomes on 18 drop-backs in which they did not even send an extra rusher, the most such pressures Mahomes has faced in his career, per Next Gen Stats.

The Chiefs won an NFL game Sunday, which is never an easy task, but don’t get it twisted: They were terrible for the better part of three

quarters, save a beautifully-written opening script. They weren’t even that much better in the fourth quarter, nor in overtime. They were just good enough, and lucky enough that Malik Willis was roaming the opposite sideline. The final stats will show 499 yards of offense, but it helps when you are permitted 13 offensive drives, because the opponent only once holds the football longer than 3:01.

This isn’t all negative, because the defense was rock solid, and there’s a value in winning games like this, lessons to be garnered, and you can’t play great football for 18 straight weeks. It just doesn’t happen. The Bills lost to the Jets earlier Sunday, and they remain the best team in football. The fact that you can still win when you have a night like the Chiefs just had is a positive.

“You gotta be able to win a game like that — where everything just isn’t perfect,” Reid said. “And your emotions are up and down. You gotta fight through that.”

Winning different types of ways is a requirement of a championship team, but the reality is if the Chiefs play that particular type of way again, they won’t win many others. Most teams, it turns out, have better production than Malik Willis at the quarterback position. And here’s a sentence I never expected to write: If the opponent Sunday had Ryan Tannehill, I’m probably writing about a different outcome.

Mahomes was forced into a career-high 68 pass attempts, and at times, it must’ve felt like he was out there all alone. He had 58 more

rushing yards that anyone paid by the Chiefs to actually run the football for a living.

The running game is a long-lasting problem, enough that it’s time to see if a change in personnel, like Ronald Jones, can prompt a change in the production, too. The offensive line, a strength of this team a year ago after its makeover, is a legitimate question mark in Week 9, and that’s not solely because of just how bad they were as a group in Week 9.

But all of that showed up because of the Titans’ game-plan, and because they had the personnel to execute it.

The Chiefs endured that offensive line makeover, in part, to counter-punch that sort of game-plan. The Titans are not the inventors of trying to pressure with strictly four, showing an immunity to sending extra rushers, but they are this year’s most extreme example. Nobody blitzes less often than they do. They did not send one blitz toward Patrick Mahomes in the entire first half and still sacked him twice.

That is not the last time the Chiefs will play a game like that because that is not the last time they will be forced to play a game like that. They will, most notably, see another when the weather is cold and the games tend to decide the mood of your offseasons.

To be sure, you have to have the personnel to pull off what the Titans did — and not many teams can match the front four the Titans provide, particularly when you consider their depth. But some do, and those are the teams that tend to still be playing in late January.

Playoff-like atmosphere is a phrase we hear frequently. The Titans provided a playoff-like scheme, the depths of which will become even more noticeable as the best football minds inside the Chiefs’ facility pore through the film. But they won’t be the only ones. The Bills have the guys to replicate it. The Bengals, too. Why wouldn’t they try?

And that’s where the Titans unwittingly did the Chiefs a favor.

If they unleashed something of a defensive road map, it might be public now, but the Chiefs have access to those records, too.

Sure, teams will mix up coverages, same as they did a year ago when the deep shells were all the rage, but there is a foundation: Pressure with four — and if those rushers can stay in their lanes to prevent scrambling, even better — and man-to-man coverage. So long as you’ve got the horses to do it.

A year ago, it was those pesky cover-2 shells. But you know, the Chiefs actually solved those looks — it was a misconception they did not — but that’s probably because they saw so dang much of them.

Now, more than ever since the departure of Tyreek Hill and the acquisition of Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster, the Chiefs have a pretty good idea of what they might see when the games matter most. And with a two-month head start.

OPPOSITE: Tennessee Titans safety Kevin Byard and linebacker Dylan Cole go after Kansas City Chiefs running back Jerick McKinnon at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

TAMMY LJUNGBLAD THE KANSAS CITY STAR

LEFT: Chiefs tight end Noah Gray makes a crucial catch and a 27-yard gain before being taken down by Tennessee Titans cornerback Roger McCreary in overtime. TAMMY LJUNGBLAD THE KANSAS CITY STAR

OPPOSITE: With play charts in hand, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid watches from the sidelines while the Chiefs score to tie the game against the Tennessee Titans in the fourth quarter.

TAMMY LJUNGBLAD / THE KANSAS CITY STAR

How Patrick Mahomes has forever changed the game — and his legacy — in Kansas City

BY SAM MCDOWELL

GLENDALE, Ariz. — It was early March, and the most influential voices inside the Chiefs organization were contemplating a move that would stun the football world.

At some point, even as the momentum in the room marched largely in the same direction, forging ahead to the trade of an All-Pro wide receiver, someone finally stated the obvious out loud — which head coach Andy Reid repeated this week:

“We didn’t lose Pat Mahomes,” Reid said. “And that was the good thing.”

In one final drive, he’s all the Chiefs needed.

Following an offseason of the most significant change of the Patrick Mahomes Era, the Chiefs are Super Bowl champions once more, with a 38-35 victory against the Philadelphia Eagles in Glendale, Arizona, in Super Bowl LVII.

They stood atop the stage for the second time in four seasons, and not because of that whirlwind of change but because of the calming

constant.

They, indeed, still have Mahomes.

On a high-ankle sprain he re-injured in the first half at State Farm Stadium, Mahomes bossed the NFL’s top-ranked defense to the tune of 21 of 27 completions for 182 yards and three touchdowns, a 131.8 passer rating.

The ultimate footprint will be the final drive. Offered the football with 5:15 to play in a tie game, Mahomes marched the Chiefs to first-andgoal before taking a couple of kneel-downs to set up Harrison Butker’s game-winning 27-yard field goal.

How’d he get there? On the injured ankle.

This was not his first Super Bowl. This will not be his last. But it might be his most memorable — beating the team that got him last year in the AFC Championship and winning a Super Bowl as a playoff underdog for the first time, all while battling a high-ankle sprain the entire postseason.

A hell of a way to finish this journey.

And a reason to remember how it all started.

The direction of a franchise forever changed at 8:19 p.m. on a late-April 2017 night, as the NFL commissioner walked to a lectern with the Chiefs on the draft board clock.

Publicly.

Behind the scenes, the shift had arrived earlier. As the Chiefs gathered intel about where they needed to position themselves in order to select Mahomes, the most informative source was, well, Mahomes. He had relayed the perceived interest from other clubs to the Chiefs so they could find the right slot.

The point here is that he picked the Chiefs. Lord knows, a city standing by the punch bowl for a quarter-century had been waiting to pick him.

Five years ago, I put out a bulletin for Chiefs fans who had lived through the postseason anguish of the past three decades. Within an hour, the inbox had 500 new emails. The group had

OPPOSITE: Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) was injured during the first half of Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2023, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. TAMMY LJUNGBLAD / THE KANSAS CITY STAR

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rallied on hope but been defined instead by fear of what awaited around the next corner.

Those moments, as it turns out, were merely the buildup for the payoff, and the payoff is sweetened by this history.

Mahomes was not responsible for that anguish, but he absorbed its consequences initially — heck, even as recently as a year ago, some fans left the Bills playoff game before the most memorable 13 seconds in franchise history. They thought they had too often seen what awaited.

They haven’t seen this guy before. He initially changed the optimism of a city. And now he’s changed the game.

He is just the 13th quarterback to win multiple Super Bowls. He’s just the fourth to win multiple Super Bowls and multiple MVP awards. He’s the first to do both in the same season since 1999.

The Chiefs are no longer the team for which you feel pity — if you were paying attention at all — but rather the team lucky enough to have this player.

from those who share a locker room with him.

On Sunday, we witnessed the start — not the conclusion — of a legacy.

The Chiefs are Super Bowl champions in an era in which they are paying their quarterback half a billion dollars. As the Eagles tucked a quarterback on a rookie contract into a roster littered with investments and the accompanying talent elsewhere, the Chiefs were forced to pay the quarterback and still find a way.

While literally gaining the Chiefs homefield advantage for a championship game every year of his starting career, he is more figuratively winning subtracted an advantage now. He will almost certainly be asked if the second title feels any differently than the first, and he will almost certainly answer than it does — the second came after an honest recognition of its difficulty, a difficulty he learned the hard way a year ago.

The defense has undergone similar changes — just three starters remained from that 2019 season — but there’s a notable difference in the two units.

The offense is responsible for this. The defense is more like the assistant to the manager. And the quarterback is most responsible for the offense. Kelce predated Mahomes, and historically speaking, his best days should have predated Mahomes. They did not. The Chiefs’ success did not predate him, either. Mahomes is an all-time great regardless of the outcome Sunday — this is a boost to his resume, not to the player he already is. Frequently, he shatters quickest-to-milestone achievements, not just annually but often weekly.

But Dan Marino had the numbers. Peyton Manning, too. Troy Aikman and Tom Brady had the championships.

OPPOSITE: Fans stand in a packed State Farm Stadium for the National Anthem during Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Ariz.

How many times have you watched an athlete at the top of his game and wondered: What would it be like to have that guy?

Leave that to Denver, Vegas and Los Angeles now.

Mahomes is of the too-good-to-be-true mold, particularly for a town in which for so long it was literally too good to be true. The best player in the sport has ingrained himself in a city that might just love its municipality even more than its quarterback. That’s a requirement for hero status here, and Mahomes has jumped in full-bore. The Royals, Sporting KC and Current now call him a minority owner.

His teammates rave about him, a leader whose admiration from the place he calls home is outweighed only by the admiration

He has bounced back from his career’s lowest moment. He has won with less talent around him, or at least with less expensive talent around him.

That is his legacy now.

The aforementioned trade — sending Tyreek Hill to Miami — was a move made out of necessity. If you pay the quarterback like the Chiefs do, well, you can’t pay everyone else like you do the quarterback.

The Chiefs’ path to this championship pitted them against teams with quarterbacks still on their rookie contract — not just Hurts but Joe Burrow before him and Trevor Lawrence before him. Time will illuminate whether they can compete in the next era.

Mahomes is now there — that’s the emphatic statement of change that came Sunday — and the lone offensive starter by his side for both titles is his tight end, Travis Kelce. That’s it.

Mahomes has the numbers and now a couple of the titles with them. He is not only unique to KC but unique to the NFL — though he is particularly unique to KC. Mahomes left the field Sunday as the most accomplished athlete to wear a Kansas City uniform, and that’s not recency bias.

He’s 27.

He’s still five years younger than when George Brett provided the Royals a World Series championship.

A city had been largely tormented since.

The Chiefs turned to 29 quarterbacks in the separation between Len Dawson and Patrick Mahomes, in search of moments that arrived Sunday.

The backup quarterback was among the most popular sports figures in town.

This quarterback is among the most popular in the world.

And he resides in KCMO.

NICK TRE. SMITH / SPECIAL TO THE KANSAS CITY STAR

ABOVE: Double-decker buses carried the members of the Kansas City Chiefs on their Super Bowl LVII victory parade and to Union Station Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in Kansas City. TAMMY LJUNGBLAD / THE KANSAS CITY STAR

ABOVE RIGHT: Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid hoists the Vince Lombardi Trophy during the Super Bowl victory parade.

NICK WAGNER / THE KANSAS CITY STAR

RIGHT: Flanked by his teammates, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes addresses the crowd as the team takes to the stage at Kansas City’s Union Station.

TAMMY LJUNGBLAD THE KANSAS CITY STAR

ABOVE: Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Derrick Nnadi cradles the Vince Lombardi Trophy during the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in Kansas City. NICK WAGNER / THE KANSAS CITY STAR

LEFT: Thousands of Chiefs fans lined Grand Boulevard to watch the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl LVII victory parade Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in downtown Kansas City. CHRIS OCHSNER THE KANSAS CITY STAR