Patrick Mahomes: The Kansas City Chiefs own the NFL; do everything in your power to stop them.
Watch Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs kick off their championship defense at home against the Detroit Lions live on Sky Sports at 1.20 a.m. on Friday. Mahomes has established himself as one of the NFL’s all-time best quarterbacks as he approaches the 2023 season in search of a third Super Bowl ring.
This is the NFL for Patrick Mahomes, unless someone takes it away from him. Many have attempted, and many more will do so.
The league has been incredibly Mahomesified to the point of an improbable comeback, submitting to genius and losing its mind over playbooks in an attempt to identify preventative measures. The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback has improved and changed by the time a flawed tidbit that seems like a solution for him shows up, and by then, he is skipping around with a triumphant delight.
He is both the already attractively equipped industry leader that remodels at an unstoppable rate in a relentless pursuit of software perfection and the Frank Abagnale who keeps one step ahead of a sly Tom Hanks, with the only distinction between the two being that the abilities he claims are very much real.
Before teams have even acknowledged that Plan A is faltering, his torpedo is headed straight for your Plan B. His ‘prime’ is still being redefined in relation to how quickly excellence has been confirmed and how quickly he raises the standard. At the most important position in football, he is the best.
In his three trips to the NFL’s championship game over the past four years, Mahomes has only recently won his second Super Bowl ring. Notably, in 2017, he spent his rookie season studying under Alex Smith. He has won two MVP awards in the Super Bowl and the league, and he became the first player to win both in a single season since Kurt Warner in 1999 last year. all before to turning 28. Before Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady could pass the torch on, he grabbed it.
Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs claims that the team has a family atmosphere and is cohesive, that he is prepared for any pass from the “unstoppable.” Kevin Mahomes
Under normal circumstances, this would be the league of Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert, Jalen Hurts, or Joe Burrow. In a perfect world, the post-Brady period would be Rodgers’ league. In a perfect world, Trevor Lawrence would have been a poster child for fame sooner rather than later. He is considered the most highly-regarded quarterback prospect since Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck. Seeing each of their distinctive individual qualities, Mahomes builds them into a formidable combination of quarterbacking totality.In the Super Bowl in February, Hurts played the best game of his life, outplaying a one-legged Mahomes who was recovering from a high ankle sprain that had allowed him to defeat the Jacksonville Jaguars earlier in the postseason. He had out-humaned Burrow’s Cincinnati Bengals a few weeks prior, a year after Lou Anarumo had out-baited him by retiring seven or eight men into coverage and challenging Mahomes to continue his aggressive downfield play. They would
subsequently learn that he soon grows tired of the same bait.With his nickel fire zone pressures, Anarumo had accomplished what many astute defensive coordinators would try to accomplish with his hokey cokey espionage: he had caused confusion for Mahomes’ field read by using a second defensive back to rush the ball late to the line of scrimmage while his weak side defensive end was retreating into coverage at the snap. He would use the Vic Fangio-cultivated two-high safety coverages to deprive the league’s greatest arms their regular dosage of 20+ yard chunk plays, and direct a defensive back to tip-toe as a “will he stay or will he go?” creeper to generate more friction.
The Bengals’ mastermind led them to victory, and Mahomes of that period bit, relying on his ingenuity and precision to take on drop-two coverages. In an attempt to counter Mahomes, Allen, and company, teams adopted Fangio philosophy as well. They lined up in two-high shells, rolled defensive backs at the snap, and invited the run with light boxes to put more pressure on the quarterback’s field read and his ability to withstand deep-ball temptations.
Mahomes needed to change, and he did. He became a more mature decision-maker, embracing the gimme throws beneath and displaying the patience to put together lengthy drives after he had previously dunked on opponents that applied pressure with their splash plays. Tyreek Hill, maybe the league’s most effective back-to-front runner, had fueled the latter, and Mahomes’ decision to distribute more short-to-intermediate passes among several receivers may have been influenced by Hill’s departure to the Miami Dolphins.
Despite this, he had the second-best passing DVOA on long balls in the league going into the Super Bowl (96.7%). You get the idea.
According to NFL expert Jason Bell of Sky Sports, “it’s really tough because it tests your patience as a player and a coordinator.” “Because he chops you up underneath and stretches you horizontally too if you play with these two safety devices back in the parking lot, as I mentioned, and try to keep it in front.
“When he starts getting first downs, you eventually realize that you need to tighten up, break on these routes, or adjust your defense or technique.
“He is waiting for that as soon as you do that, and that’s when he makes the huge play. For your counter, he has a counter.”
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