The Chiefs lost the Super Bowl at the line of scrimmage.
Football is rarely this simple, and even here we can get into the weeds about dropped passes, mental mistakes, a few bad calls and a lack of emotional discipline. But, mostly, the Chiefs lost to — got blown out by — the Bucs in Super Bowl LV because they could not pressure Tom Brady and they could not keep the Bucs from pressuring Patrick Mahomes.
At least for now we will focus on the Chiefs’ blocking. This team will rise and fall with Mahomes, who has shown he will rise if given even a decent amount of time.
The Chiefs’ inability to protect him in the Super Bowl, combined with the offensive line’s short- and long-term outlook being rocked by injuries, creates the team’s most urgent area of concern in the goal of maximizing both Mahomes’ talent and the organization’s continued championship chase.
The solution is part strategy and part in-house, but must also include improvements from the outside.
Consider this: Mahomes was pressured on 29 of 56 dropbacks despite being blitzed just six times, according to Pro Football Focus, and covered an astounding 497 yards scrambling away from that pressure, according to Next Gen Stats.
Mahomes has made us believe nothing is impossible. But he met his limit against the Bucs. The offensive line just didn’t give the Chiefs a chance.
He hinted at those problems immediately after the game, but on Monday he took more of the blame.
“There were some plays where I got the line going in the wrong direction,” he said. “At the end of the day we just didn’t execute. That’s the biggest thing. A lot of times it gets put on that O-line because I’m scrambling around, but if we’re not executing as far as me making the right reads, getting the ball out of my hand to the receivers on time, then nothing’s going to work.
“(The line gets) that blame sometimes, but sometimes it’s not deserved, because a lot of it is on me and people just don’t see it that way.”
The line got trucked, and repeatedly. The Chiefs did some chips with backs or tight ends on the Bucs’ rushers, but for the most part they relied on five-man protections.
This is football’s cat-and-mouse game, a bet by the Chiefs that an extra receiver will cause more problems for the defense than an extra blocker will protect.
“We want to be ourselves,” Mahomes said. “We really hadn’t been really stopped with what we had been doing all year long. Obviously we gave chips, and we gave little extra-protection hits and stuff like that. But at the end of the day we want to use our speed and use what we’ve been doing.”
Mahomes is not making stuff up, but he’s also being a good teammate by claiming blame. Because while he is undoubtedly being honest about missing some protection calls, part of what he’s not saying is that he erases far more problems for the line than he creates.
The NFL moves fast, so even with the loss still fresh this is not about litigating the problems of the Super Bowl.
This is about inventorying what went wrong, balanced with everything that went right in the previous 18 games, aimed toward the best possible solution for the 2021 season.
“I’m not obviously pointing my finger at the offensive line,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “We had guys that were moving around a little bit, and they take great pride in their work and busted their tails.”
In the next few days the coaches will conduct personnel evaluations, with full-season grades and future outlooks turned in to GM Brett Veach and the front office. This is the beginning of a group taking honest self-reflection about the good and the bad.
Reid also knows that group must get better, and it’s worth noting here that even if the Chiefs did nothing this offseason they would begin the 2021 season with a better line than the one with which they finished 2020.
Lucas Niang, the third-round pick out of TCU, is expected to join the Chiefs after opting out of 2020. He did not allow a single sack in 44 games at TCU, and No. 2 overall pick Chase Young called him the best lineman he faced in college. Niang played tackle at TCU, but Veach envisions Niang playing guard in the NFL, at least initially.
Laurent Duvernay-Tardif is also expected back after opting out. Duvernay-Tardif is a better pass protector than run blocker, but at the very least he would provide the Chiefs some level of dependability.
But the Chiefs will want to do more than add guys for whom they already own the rights. For years, the Chiefs’ strategy on the offensive line has largely been to invest big in the tackles and make moving parts work inside.
But left tackle Eric Fisher suffered a ruptured Achilles in the AFC Championship Game, an injury with a median recovery time of about 11 months. That timeline would put him back on the field just before next season’s playoffs.
Mitchell Schwartz, one of the game’s best right tackles, did not play after Week 6 because of a back injury. The Chiefs have not specified the extent of his injury, but heightened concern is appropriate for a soon-to-be 32-year-old offensive lineman with a bad back.
The Chiefs will pick 31st in the draft, which typically isn’t a great spot to address a need. But the 2021 draft class is considered to be deep at offensive line in general and at tackle in particular. There are some intriguing names in free agency, though with the cap limited by COVID-19 the Chiefs will have to be discerning about every dollar they spend.
The Chiefs play a very specific way. They rely heavily on five-man protections to lord their strength of playmakers over every defense. The Bucs won that game of chicken in the Super Bowl, but the Chiefs winning 25 of their last 27 competitive games shows how difficult that is.
We are not at a breaking point, then. The Chiefs have not been exposed. The NFL did not just receive step-by-step directions on how to turn Mahomes into Nate Peterman. What happened is one of the league’s best pass rushes faced a line with just one original starter, buoyed by an exceptional game plan created by a terrific coordinator and executed by a top defense.
That’s not a blueprint many can follow.
But it is enough that the Chiefs know their most important offseason priority. They must exhaust every opportunity, particularly via the draft, to protect the NFL’s most valuable asset and again unlock the league’s most explosive offense.
