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Time to panic about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs? Separating fact from fiction, who's to blame and what's next - ESPN
Oct 25, 2021 6 mins, 3 secs

A wildly frustrating start to the Kansas City Chiefs' 2021 season turned ugly on Sunday.

Mike Vrabel's team took its foot off the gas and didn't score in the second half, but the Chiefs could muster only a lone field goal in what was the worst offensive performance of the Patrick Mahomes era.

At 3-4, the Chiefs have as many losses through seven weeks as they've had through any full season since Mahomes took over as their starter in 2018.

In 2018, when Mahomes took over as the full-time starter and won MVP, the Chiefs turned the ball over 18 times all season.

In 2019, even with an injured Mahomes missing time, they turned the ball over just 15 times.

Last season, they turned the ball over 16 times in 16 games.

In 2021, they have turned the ball over 17 times in seven games.

Every quarterback deals with tipped picks, but it sure feels like a disproportionate number of tipped balls in Kansas City games have resulted in interceptions in 2021.

In its own weird way, it's a strange testament to how good the Chiefs have been on offense that they can still rate this highly while simultaneously leading the league in giveaways.

Strip out the plays that resulted in turnovers for each team and they would be averaging 0.26 expected points per snap on offense, which would be the best mark in football.

We can't just write off those takeaways for what has happened so far, but we have three years of evidence suggesting that the Chiefs aren't going to run a 33% fumble recovery rate and Mahomes won't throw interceptions on more than 3% of his passes over the remainder of the season.

They have been very good on offense even while dealing with turnovers, and they're not likely to turn the ball over this frequently as the season goes on.

I liked Chris Brown's comparison between the 2021 Chiefs and the 1999-2001 Rams, who led the league in points per possession three straight years despite ranking 18th, 25th and 31st in turnover rate over that span.

If you're a talking head looking to break down what has been stopping this team on offense this season (a thing that, as you saw from the previous section, had not happened before Sunday), the simple answer has been to talk about a two-high shell.

By playing Cover 2, Cover 4 or two-man coverage, defenses have protected themselves from the vertical shots on which the Chiefs thrived in years past.

Defensive coordinators realized that they needed to protect downfield with two deep safeties against then sometime around Week 3 of the 2018 season.

More recently, we saw the Texans and Bills both play heavy doses of two-high coverage with extremely deep safeties during the 2020 regular season in games the Chiefs won while scoring a combined 60 points.

In 2021, with the league as a whole upping its two-deep coverage rate to nearly 38%, opposing defenses have played two deep safeties against Mahomes & Co.

Despite the criticisms levied at Edwards-Helaire before his injury, the Chiefs have run the ball efficiently this season, ranking fifth in EPA per rush play, ahead of the Ravens.

They're also much more efficient throwing the ball than they are running the ball, even against those shells and with Mahomes' interceptions.

Could Andy Reid's team run the ball more.

His offenses are always going to be pass-happy, but owing perhaps to the defenses they've seen, the Chiefs are actually running the ball more frequently in 2021 than they have in years past.

On early downs while neither team has a commanding lead, they are throwing the ball 62.3% of the time, which is the league's second-highest rate behind the Bills.

From 2018 to '20, they threw the ball 64.1% of the time, which was more than five percentage points more than any other team in the league.

The Chiefs aren't moving the ball the same way.

He hit 50 completions on those throws across 45 games between 2018 and 2020; he has six in seven games this season.

He ranked third in QBR on those passes over his first three years, and he's 12th this season.

What is true, though, is that the Chiefs haven't turned many of their short plays into bigger gains.

The average Mahomes pass before 2021 expected to generate 5.4 YAC; this season, that's down to 4.7 YAC.

Over the first three seasons of the Mahomes era, the Chiefs produced 17 plays for 50 yards or more.

On 474 snaps this season, the Chiefs have one 50-plus yard gain, a 75-yard touchdown to Hill in the opener.

From 2018 to '20, he averaged 7.9 yards per attempt and posted a 87.1 QBR when he held the ball for at least five seconds before throwing.

I don't think Kansas City can sustain that rate over an entire season, given that it hit at about 48% of the time between 2018 and 2020.

The trade-off is well worth it, of course; nobody complained when Mahomes took a nine- or 10-stop drop on third-and-15 in the Super Bowl LIV and turned the game around with a deep pass to Hill.

I recognize that it's easy to see a struggling Chiefs team that has been built around its offense for years and try to pin their problems on Mahomes & Co., but let's be realistic.

This is where the Chiefs ranked in terms of WPA per game, split by offense and defense:.

WPA ranking in 2018-20: 1st on offense, 23rd on defense.

WPA ranking in 2021: 14th on offense, 28th on defense.

It's true that the offense isn't contributing as much as the offense typically does for the Chiefs, but that decline (fueled by turnovers) isn't the problem with this team.

The offense was carrying the defense for the Mahomes era, and with that unit falling back toward the pack during an inconsistent start, the defense has only gotten worse.

If you miss the old Mahomes and the old Chiefs offense, all you have to do is just watch this defense and wait for the pass rush to not get home.

The hope for the Chiefs throughout the season on defense has been that they're one return or one roster move away from looking just fine on that side of the ball.

Well, all of those things have happened, and the Chiefs still aren't good on defense.

The Chiefs defense makes every offense they play look like the 2018 Chiefs.

For a team that seems to be struggling with everything on defense, the Chiefs need to at least get good at something.

In a spot in which the Chiefs drafted players such as Mitch Morse and Jones in years past, they haven't found difference-makers since Veach took over.

Thornhill looked promising as a rookie before tearing his ACL, but the organization was starting Sorensen over him to begin the 2021 season.

Humphrey and linebacker Nick Bolton have shown more promise as rookies, but the Chiefs would have hoped to have found at least one above-average starter out of those four picks between 2018 and 2020.

The Chiefs are just about the opposite of that Patriots team in many ways, but it's not too late for a great team to turn things around

On top of that, the Chiefs have advantages over those teams and many of the other 3-4 team from the past

Is any team going to want to play them with their season on the line

The Chiefs are not the best team in football right now

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