On first and second down, Andy Reid played it by the book.
An Isiah Pacheco run up the middle, stuffed for a one-yard loss, forcing the Baltimore Ravens to burn their second timeout. Pacheco again, off right tackle, for two yards, making Baltimore spend its final timeout. And with 2:19 left in the AFC championship, Reid’s all-universe quarterback trotted back to the sideline, with a set of directions for the coaches.
Patrick Mahomes told them.
To the untrained ear, that might’ve sounded like simple bravado from a superstar. In this case, it was more than that. It went back about 20 hours or so to the Kansas City Chiefs’ weekly Saturday night quarterbacks meeting at the team hotel in the Baltimore suburbs.
It was there that Reid, offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, pass-game coordinator Joe Bleymeier, quarterbacks coach David Girardi, and offensive assistants Corey Matthaei, Dan Williams and Kevin Saxton met with Mahomes and backup QB Blaine Gabbert, coming up with the call that would be the eventual dagger to send Kansas City to Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas. It was Mahomes’s confidence in their idea that prompted the demand.
“We had that ready for the moment,” Nagy told me on the field postgame, a swing pass away from the stage where the Chiefs accepted anotherLamar Hunt Trophy. “We had a handful of plays, we were on the sideline talking through the situation, probably halfway through the fourth quarter We’d talked about that at the hotel.”
The concept from the night before called for three in-breaking routes out of a three-by-one formation (three wide receivers to the left, one to the right), with a back and tight end staying in to help against the blitz. For the play to work, the protection would have to give Mahomes time, and his receivers would have to win against man-to-man coverage. And, of course, Mahomes would have to make the throw.
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“You know in that situation, they’re going to pressure you,” Nagy continued. “Now it’s about the guys making the plays.”
Check. Check. And checkmate.
Much-maligned receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling beat Ravens corner Arthur Maulet, and Mahomes stood in against pressure and got the ball to where only his receiver could catch it.
The play covered 32 yards, driving the aforementioned dagger into the Ravens.
“We get the quarterbacks’ input on things [on Saturday night], and that, jointly, was the play we wanted at that particular time,” Reid told me in a quiet moment after the game. “We try to cover all those situations, make sure we have it well thought out before we get in there. That was the result of it."
The result, ultimately, was a 17–10 win for the Chiefs in Baltimore. The result of it was a fourth trip to the Super Bowl in five years for Kansas City. And maybe most of all, the result of it was another Mahomes moment in a massive spot, something that, by now, we should all be pretty accustomed to.
Simply put, it’s why the Chiefs never hesitate to put the ball in his hands.
