BY JOSE FAUS
SPORTS REPORTER
If you are Patrick Mahomes, the future Hall-of-Fame quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, Sunday afternoon’s game against the Buffalo Bills is the kind of game you never want to repeat, and if you have any pull in the universe it is the kind of game you want to delete from your resume.
Sunday’s performance will haunt Mahomes the rest of his career. It will hopefully be the low bar he will struggle to never approach. Mahomes had the lowest completion rate of his career barely making 44.1 percent of his completions. Josh Allen by comparison was 23 of 26 for 273 yards and a touchdown. 88.5 percent is twice as effective.
By that stat line you would think the game was out of hand but in fact the Chiefs were marching down the field with four minutes and change remaining and a chance to tie the game. Such things are possible when one plays a game that calls an oblong inflated pig skin a ball. That’s akin to taking a leather cube inflating it with air and calling it a ball.
You could come up with bizarre rules that allow you to change the outcome of the game. Like say the ball is tipped as it makes its way to a receiver but falls short of its target when a defender deflects the ball’s trajectory. Call a penalty on it and take away the momentum the team was generating and then wash your hands of the error and say the rules don’t allow a review.
I’m not going to get into it but riddle me this, why do you get to review a play like that when it comes to pass interference, but not then? But I digress. Kansa City did not lose the game because of the idiocy of a single call by the referees or because of the shape of the sphere that masquerades as a ball. They lost the game because for some reason, even the players can’t decipher, they came out listless.
Those are not my words but the words of some of the players talking about how the Bills were more energetic. That’s a head scratcher if ever there was one. It is becoming the go to excuse for the team. So if you can say the energy level does not rise to the competition’s energy then why not change it? Or is it something that can’t be changed so ingrained in your psyche that this will go down as the season where the Chiefs could not get excited for a game they all love to play?
Many things went wrong in this game. The defense, which had been stout most of the season had the kind of pedestrian performance that will also haunt them the rest of the season. Some things are better forgotten but not this. Keep it in your mental rolodex and strive to do better.
It’s always interesting after a loss when announcers tell you, this team or that team has the formula for how to beat the Chiefs. Get the ground game going and send the tight ends like marauders into middle of the field. Clog up the rushing lanes and more importantly be assignment dedicated and keep Mahomes inside the pocket. Guaranteed victory. That’s what Buffalo did and did over and over.
And yet there they were at the end of the game with a chance to tie and maybe get the overtime mojo going and win an exciting game. Everything was on the line, and it is still hard for me to accept that listlessness is the reason for the result. Because if it is, this is the sorriest excuse for what could be a debacle of a season.
I did not think they came out listless. I could question some calls and tendencies. Like going on first down with Kareem Hunt up the middle. It worked till it didn’t on a crucial play at the end of the first half. The Chiefs could have used those four points later setting up field positions for a tying field goal towards the end of the game.
Like any fan I love to see the gaudy catch down field but I’m also a lover of the patient game, and deception. Throw a pass when everyone, even the totally uninterested observer, knows you are going to run the back up the middle.
One thing that stands out from the glory days of the Hank Stram era was the installation of the moving pocket. Or the curse of the swing pass, or the effectiveness of the bootleg. But I’m not a coach. I’m an interested bystander spending the better part of a Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Saturday afternoon to watch a game.
I’m looking for energy and consistency, even a methodical, boring but crushing offense and a consistent bend-don’t-break defense. Heck at this point I will settle for just scoring more points than the other team. That could be wins.
