How Jerick McKinnon became the Chiefs’ record-breaking offensive X-Factor

Some NFL players have to wait to find their ultimate roles. For those types of players, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish” becomes the guiding philosophy. It has certainly been the case this season for Kansas City Chiefs running back Jerick McKinnon. Selected in the third round of the 2014 draft by the Minnesota Vikings out of Georgia Southern, McKinnon had bit roles in Minnesota’s offense over four seasons.

In 2018, McKinnon signed a four-year, $30 million contract with the San Francisco 49ers, but he suffered a torn ACL in a team workout on September 1, and missed the entire season. Setbacks in his recovery also cost McKinnon the 2019 season, and he was a forgotten man for a while. He did come back for the 2020 season, thriving in Kyle Shanahan’s offense to a degree with 319 rushing yards and five touchdowns on 81 carries, adding 253 receiving yards and a touchdown on 33 carries.

McKinnon moved to the Kansas City Chiefs on a one-year deal in 2021, playing through injuries and putting up some big numbers in the playoffs. He had 142 yards from scrimmage in the wild-card round against the Pittsburgh Steelers, after which Patrick Mahomes called him a “playmaker.”

“Obviously he’s dealt with injury in his career, and he dealt with a little bit of injury this season, but he’s kept his mindset right, he’s kept working hard,” McKinnon’s quarterback said. “And I knew with some other guys kind of being down and dinged up that he would step in and fill in nicely.”

But it wasn’t until the 2022 season that McKinnon was able to show his full palette of skills in an ideal offense. With Tyreek Hill gone to the Miami Dolphins in a blockbuster offseason trade, the Chiefs have done a lot of things differently on their way to a 14-3 record and the AFC’s one-seed. This season, per Sports Info Solutions, Mahomes has more dropbacks with two tight ends (199) and three tight ends (57) than any other quarterback, which is quite different than in previous seasons.

But in recent weeks, the real X-Factor in Kansas City’s offense has been the addition of McKinnon as a primary red-zone receiver. When he caught this two-yard shovel pass touchdown from Mahomes with 12:52 left in the first quarter of Kansas City’s Saturday win over the Las Vegas Raiders…

…McKinnon extended a historic streak in which he has caught at least one touchdown pass in six straight games — no running back since at least 1970 had ever done that before, and his nine touchdown receptions this season is tied for the most since 1970, along with Marshall Faulk (2001), Chuck Foreman (1975), and Leroy Hoard (1991). Only Washington’s Charley Taylor, who had 12 touchdown catches in 1966, had more among running backs in pro football history, and like McKinnon, Taylor split his time between runner and receiver.

So, how has McKinnon become such a crucial part of an offense in which he was mostly an innocent bystander until recently? And does McKinnon ever reflect on how far he’s come?

“All the time,” he said last Sunday, after he caught five passes for 52 yards in Kansas City’s 27-24 win over the Denver Broncos. “In San Francisco I had the two knee surgeries; I missed two years in a row. That was definitely tough for me, just being in that situation. The unexpected and not knowing and then getting a call from the Kansas City Chiefs, me and EB [offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy] had a good relationship that carried on throughout the years. [Head] coach [Andy] Reid, I watched him from afar over the years as well ever since I was little. Just being able to be in an offense and a scheme like this was intriguing when I first came here. So, I was definitely thankful for the opportunity. Just the preparation and everything is paying off.”

It certainly is paying off, and now, McKinnon is set to perhaps go on another fairly epic postseason run. Here’s how the Chiefs have made him a crucial part of the plan.

Exploiting red zone deception... and defensive confusion.

(Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports)

The Chiefs can throw crazy quilts at any defense in the red zone, and since Week 13 — when McKinnon’s stretch as the red zone closer really started — no player has more touchdown catches from the opposing 10-yard line and in than McKinnon’s six. This six-yard touchdown against the Broncos last week was a particularly ridiculous example of how Reid and Bieniemy are dialing things up to make things just about impossible to defend.

To start, there’s receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster and tight end Noah Gray running mesh. Then, there’s tight end Travis Kelce running a pivot route over the middle, and receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling running a slant to further gum things up to the goalpost. With all that happening, McKinnon was able to easily leak out from the backfield, with defensive tackle Mike Purcell trying to catch up. Not the best matchup for Denver’s defense.

“He just finds a way to get in the end zone,” Mahomes said of McKinnon after the Denver game. “A lot of those things, he’s not the first read, he’s not the second read. I mean the first [touchdown], he was. We had the little screen pass versus the pressure look that they had that Coach EB and the coaches called. That was a great call. But I think the fact that he’s able to just be in the right spot at the right time whenever I need to hit a checkdown, I can get it to him and then he makes the most of it by getting into the end zone.

“It’s cool to see because he just does his job. I think that’s the biggest thing is he does his job to the best of his ability – if that’s protecting, if that’s running the route, whatever that is, running the football. And those are the guys that you need to go out there and win football games and you just want other guys to keep doing that because he does it to the best of his ability every single time.”

Winning out wide.

(Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports)

McKinnon has lined up as an outside receiver on just 22 plays this season, but he’s caught all three passes thrown to him in those instances. Two of those receptions came in Kansas City’s 30-29 Week 5 win over the Raiders. We’ll get to that in a minute, but the other (and most explosive) such play also came against the Broncos in Week 17. This was a zone-beater route from wide right against Denver’s Cover-3, and McKinnon played it perfectly, settling over cornerback Lamar Jackson and under safety Justin Simmons, and then spinning through the middle of the field for extra yards.

That took the ball from the Kansas City 25-yard line to the Las Vegas 48-yard line. Mahomes missed Kelce on a deep pass on the next play. So, with seven seconds left in the first half, the Chiefs ran the same thing, gaining seven yards this time.

Not that you should expect to see McKinnon flared out wide 20 times in a playoff game… but the way the Chiefs are rolling right now, it’s not out of the question.

Releasing to daylight.

(Kareem Elgazzar-USA TODAY Sports)

Against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 13, the Chiefs ran a similar concept to the one that got McKinnon a touchdown in Saturday’s game against the Raiders. The extent to which both Mahomes and McKinnon were able to adjust to a different defensive game plan was highly interesting.

This two-yard touchdown against Cincinnati’s red zone Cover-1 was a great man-beater; just McKinnon releasing across the formation to the left flat. The Chiefs also ran another mesh concept to get the defense stuck in the middle, and with the additional pressure of Kelce and Valdes-Scantling running crossers over mesh from bunch left, McKinnon was wide open for the score.

The touchdown against the Raiders was similar in the mesh concept and the crosser looks from bunch left, though Kelce came back around to the left side. But the Raiders did something differently — they had the aforementioned Roderic Teamer basically spying McKinnon all the way through… until Teamer had to break off to try to stop Mahomes from running in for the touchdown. Only then did Mahomes pitch to McKinnon.

One more way in which McKinnon has become a force multiplier in a highly-schemed offense designed to cause defensive confusion at every point of the play.

Exploding in the run game.

(Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports)

McKinnon hasn’t run the ball a lot this season — 72 carries for 291 yards and a touchdown — but he is capable of creating explosive plays under the right circumstances. Per Pro Football Focus, he has forced nine missed tackles, and he has three runs of 15 yards or more. McKinnon’s speed obviously comes into play here, but he’s also pretty good at getting yards after contact for a smaller (5-foot-9, 209 pounds). The Houston Texans found this all out the hard way in Week 15, when McKinnon broke off a 26-yard run in overtime to seal the Chiefs’ 30-24 win.

That clinched the AFC West for the Chiefs.

“Obviously you always want to end the game with a touchdown,” Mahomes said of this play. “We’re in field goal range, so we’re going to protect it and play it a little bit safer. They brought everybody up in the line of scrimmage to stop the run. The offensive line washed them down, and then Jet (RB Jerick McKinnon) hit the right spot and showed off his speed that he’s still got. He’s getting a little old, but he got a little bit of speed left and got it in the end zone. It was just execution by everybody. Everybody did their job. When we do that, we’re hard to stop. We’ve just got to do that for an entire game.”

The Texans were playing Cover-0 on this play, and it didn’t matter.

“We were coming into the huddle, and, obviously, we were running the four-minute ball and [the Texans were] stacking the box,” McKinnon recalled. “So, it was a little tough. Pat, he looked at me and said, ‘Two hands on the ball. Let’s go.’ I said, ‘I’m about to score.’ JuJu looked at me. He said, ‘I got your block, bro. Find me when you get out there.’ It worked out exactly like that. I made it to the second level, and I literally ran off of JuJu’s block and was able to score. It’s just crazy it worked out like that, man. It’s crazy.”

Crazy, but one more way in which McKinnon is helping to define this offense under the radar.

McKinnon's career revival comes at the perfect time.

(Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports)

The Chiefs are obviously in their bag now when it comes to offensive creativity.

Reid and Bieniemy are throwing their entire offensive playbook right at the heads of every defense they face, and it’s clicking at the right time. The new multiple tight end looks are a big part of it. Newcomers Kadarius Toney and Isiah Pacheco are as well. 

But if there’s one guy who seems to have solidified the new-look Chiefs offense, it’s McKinnon. After a protracted, unlucky, and frustrating career path, he’s turned it around, found himself in the ideal offense for what he can do, and he’s maximizing all of it to a record-setting degree.

“He’s a very, very good football player that happens to play the running back position,’’ Bieniemy recently said. “That’s been Jerick’s story his whole entire career.

“Jerick is doing everything that we expected him to do, and that’s just who he is. He’s the ultimate professional, he does a great job of working it on the field, but the thing I don’t think he probably gets enough credit for is just his leadership that he provides — being an example of what it takes to be a professional to all the young players in our room.”

Mahomes has certainly bought in.

“It’s not like he’s looking for the glory or the praise,” McKinnon’s quarterback has said. “He just comes to work every single day with a smile on his face and he brings the energy. You ask anybody in the locker room, he’s probably one of, if not the favorite guy in the locker room. Everybody loves him, and that’s the type of guy he is, and it’s good to see that it’s paying off, all the hard work that he’s doing. And hopefully he can keep scoring touchdowns.”

At this point, it would be foolish to assume that he can’t.

Story originally appeared on Touchdown Wire