Chiefs players aren’t making excuses after Super Bowl LV loss
The Kansas City Chiefs managed to have one of their worst games of the season on the biggest stage.
The easy thing to do when you suffer a brutal loss in a big game like this is to make excuses, but this team was still laser-focused following the game. They knew that there wasn’t any excuse justifying their loss in the Super Bowl.
There were record-setting penalty and pressure numbers. It was a game during which the Chiefs started a number of reserve offensive linemen due to injuries. The quarterback was battling through a toe injury. No matter the potential excuse, and there’s a laundry list of them, it all came down to one thing. The Bucs were the better team on Sunday.
“They were the better team today,” Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes told reporters. “They beat us pretty good, the worst that I think I’ve been beaten in a long time.”
The stat sheet won’t show it, but Mahomes gave a tremendous performance. Any normal quarterback would have been sacked a dozen times out there. The easy way out would have been to use his toe injury as an excuse, but that wasn’t of interest to Mahomes.
“Yeah, I can’t say the toe was a problem when I played last week or two weeks ago and I played well on it,” Mahomes said. “It’s something you battle through. You’re playing football you have to battle through injuries.”
The offensive line struggled with the Buccaneers’ defensive front all night long. There were a lot of players out there who normally wouldn’t be out there because of injuries suffered in the season and leading up to the game. When asked about the chemistry between the group that played on Sunday night, RT Andrew Wylie refused to use that as an excuse.
“No, we had a lot of time with the group that went out there today,” Wylie told reporters. “We practiced well, we meshed well. We just, overall, we didn’t get it done… I don’t think that’s the issue at all. We play well together, we’re a great group of guys, even the guys that didn’t get a chance to play tonight. We’re very capable.”
A common question for players following the game was about the number of penalties called on Kansas City. Over 100 penalty yards for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl compared to just 39 for the Buccaneers. Chiefs DE Frank Clark wasn’t interested in blaming penalties for the loss, though. He was more concerned with the lack of execution from him and his defensive teammates.
“I’m not surprised,” Clark told reporters. “An action is an action. At the end of the day, we knew what we were getting ourselves into. You understand who the refs are, you understand what’s not going to get called. I’m not going to sit here and say the penalties is the reason we lost. It was multiple things. Like I said before, man, it’s execution. You’ve got to execute, you’ve got to make tackles. You can’t expect to go out there and win games when you’re missing tackles and running backs, they’re getting their extra yards.”
It’s easy to get down after a loss in Super Bowl, but Mahomes had a great perspective on the situation. One that he seemingly spread to the rest of the locker room too.
“Yeah, I mean my dad had lost in the World Series in his career and he continued to battle and continued to be who he was,” Mahomes said. “Obviously, it hurts right now. It hurts a lot. But we’re going to continue to get better. We’ve got a young group of guys that have had a lot of success and learned from that, but we’ve had a few failures and we have to learn from that. We can’t let this define us. We have to continue to get better going into next year, being even better and hopefully be in this game again.”
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The morning after a Chiefs Super Bowl LV loss
