So, NFL defenses found a blueprint to slow Patrick Mahomes, KC Chiefs. Well, kind of

The Chiefs designed their spring and summer months as a response to a Super Bowl gone shockingly awry, from a general manager’s roster construction to a quarterback’s purposeful, even if nearly impossible, challenge of an unbeaten season.

Because soon after they departed the field that night in Tampa Bay, the wrong shade of red-orange confetti littering the field, they sought to frame the answer to an obvious question:

Had a team leaked the blueprint on how to defend the Chiefs, publicizing it for all the NFL to see?

“You gotta understand — you’ll always take a look from the previous season (and ask) what were some of the games that gave you problems,” Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy said. “So everybody is taking a look at what Tampa Bay did to us in the Super Bowl.”

Yes, for all of the internal evaluations and resulting changes, the Chiefs are learning that the opposition isn’t ready to change a thing. Not yet.

Still today, when quarterback Patrick Mahomes drops back in the pocket, he’s reminded of what he saw that fateful night in Tampa Bay eight months earlier — a steady dose of shell zone defenses, the back end of the secondary straying from the line of scrimmage to take away the home run shot.

But is it working?

Well, it’s complicated. This is a weird one. It’s working well enough for teams to keep doing it. We can say that. (Buffalo played that way Sunday.)

But you might be surprised to know the Chiefs are moving the football at a historic pace this season. They’re scoring at a historic pace, too, even better than the year Mahomes won the MVP.

Yet they’re just 2-3. They have already lost more games than they lost all of last season. How can that be? How can a team be so good on a per-drive basis and be sitting at a crossroads in their season?

The defense is part of it. A large part of it. But this an out-loud thought experiment on the other side of the football. An analysis to whether a league with which Mahomes once toyed has finally fired back.

To which we say ... kind of?

At the very least, they’ve opened the wound to a fatal flaw.

“If we can really cut off the turnovers — and we kind of have to now,” Mahomes said, “I think we could be a really, really good offense, and a great one hopefully.”

When and why the Chiefs are being stopped

Let’s revert back to Week 3 for an easy example, but keep in mind there are many. The opening drive against the Chargers that weekend had spanned nine plays, not even the disguise of defensive resistance, when Mahomes spotted a receiver crossing over the middle. Without moving his eyes, Mahomes released the football to a wide-open Marcus Kemp. The ball deflected off Kemp’s shoulder pads, twirled in the air and found an unintended home in the arms of Chargers cornerback Asante Samuel Jr.

The Chargers had done so little to stop the Chiefs and instead patiently waited as a stop fell into their laps.

But that’s the idea — if you make the Chiefs nickel and dime their way down the field, you multiply the amount of snaps and therefore multiply the possibility of that one mistake.

Sometimes, that’s all you need.

“We’re moving the ball and moving the ball down the field at a high rate. We’re executing — not having a lot of three-and-outs and stuff like that. That’s what you want as an offense,” Mahomes said. “But I mean once you have turnovers happen, it kind of ruins everything. It takes that great offense that we can be and just knocks it down to a very average one.”

The Chiefs lead the NFL with 11 turnovers. Mahomes’ six interceptions outrank the amount he threw last season. It’s an offense built for speed, not one built for patience. We say that because they have the best home-run threat in football in Tyreek Hill but also because they have Mahomes, a man who, doggone it, wants to swing for the fences.

This is the opposition’s thinking. It’s why they’re dropping defenders into coverage like never before. Mahomes is facing the fewest percentage of blitzes in his life. No quarterback in the NFL has seen fewer eight-man boxes.

When a receiver ultimately beats his man off the line of scrimmage, he’s simply greeted with another. Tyreek Hill, the receiver who believes he can beat anyone in a foot race, has no one waiting at the starting blocks, but rather two-plus defenders who cheated and began the race at the finish line.

It’s all designed for one purpose — turn the Chiefs into a dink and dunk offense. Right now, they have little other choice but to oblige.

“Does it take a certain concentration level to do it? Yeah,” Reid said. “It’s tough to drive the length of the field.

“Sometimes you got to pump the breaks a little bit and just (take) what’s given, and you roll there.”

They are. That’s the funny thing about all this. It’s the complication in forming some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Some statistics show the Chiefs have never been better offensively. They lead in Football Outsiders’ offense DVOA. They are scoring 3.34 points per drive, a significant margin better than the second-place Chargers (3.02) and also better than at any point in Mahomes’ career.

This notion that the NFL has solved the Chiefs offense, well, it’s only true if you can force turnovers. That’s the problem, though, right? Teams have forced turnovers. They have waited on the mistakes.

And until that ends, the deep shell remains.

How the Chiefs have adjusted

There’s a popular meme in Kansas City.

“(Screw) it,” it begins, except with a bit of a harsher expletive. “Tyreek down there somewhere.”

Nowadays, Tyreek is still down there. But so are a couple of buddies. At one point Sunday night, Hill took about half a second to create separation off the of scrimmage. A bending corner route sent him into the secondary, where the Bills had two more defenders waiting. They had dropped into a Cover-Four.

The easiest way to describe what the Chiefs are seeing is to say defenses are daring them to throw shorter routes. Daring them to run the ball. Daring them to do anything other than score quickly.

“The shell zones — so whether it’s two-deep or quarters or palms, which is kind of a mixture of cover-four and two — they’re making you work your way down the field,” Reid said. “So, we’re putting these drives together, and we’re having hiccups within the drives where you’re having turnovers or penalties. Those things, they kill you.

“It’s not that you’re not racking up the yards, and it’s not that you’re not moving the ball. You just got to be more consistent with it and be able to sustain these drives.”

It’s rare for Reid to so willingly describe the scheme, even an opposing one. But the secret is long out, shared with 97 million people in February.

No team in football sees as few defenders at the line of scrimmage, the opposition instead prioritizing the back end. The running back to see the fewest eight-man boxes this year? That’s Darrel Williams at 3.85%, per NextGenStats. The running back to see the second fewest? That’s Clyde Edwards-Helaire. Those are the top-two backs on the Chiefs’ depth chart. (By comparison, Tennessee’s Derrick Henry sees eight-man boxes 41.55% of the time and Carolina’s Christian McCaffrey is at 42.31%.)

But it shows up in the passing numbers, too. Mahomes’ average pass travels to a target positioned 7.7 yards downfield. It was 8.5 yards last year, 8.6 in 2019 and 9.2 in his MVP season.

Mahomes is not only averaging a career low 7.6 yards per pass attempt, but all of his top receivers are pacing career-lows, too. Hill’s average yards before the catch is 9.4. Travis Kelce’s is 6.1, and he has never finished a year below 7.4 in that statistic since Mahomes took over. Mecole Hardman’s average catch finds him just 3.6 yards downfield. That number was 9.5 just two years ago.

Which demonstrates the Chiefs have made an adjustment, albeit a forced one. It’s a medicine they might not have enjoyed digesting, but it’s done the trick — because absent the turnovers, the efficiency of drives remains. These plays are productive in moving the ball against defenses they long expected to see.

Back in the offseason, even after revamping the offensive line, the Chiefs game-planned against the deep shells. They knew they’d have to prove they could beat it before teams began the cycle anew of searching for a way to slow Mahomes.

This is today’s flavor. Each team provides its own wrinkle, its own attempt to be less predictable.

But the Chiefs know what’s coming.

“I mean, it’s something we worked on at the end of last year (when) you started seeing defenses play over the top and let us have the short gains,” Mahomes said. “We’ve had good weeks at it, and we’ve had weeks like this last week where we didn’t do so well at it. It’s about execution; it’s about taking what’s there; it’s about running the football; it’s about throwing short completions.

“And then once defenses have come up — because we’re showing we can do that — we’ll still be able to connect on those long plays.”