KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Film study prompts the game plan, and when it comes to this process, the Chiefs have one of the best in the industry. That's the way offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy describes it.
His boss, he says, has become pretty darn good at anticipating what he will see any given week. Andy Reid has mastered exploiting his team's strengths, and he's equally keen on exploiting another's weakness.
But there's a wrinkle this year. Teams aren't quite themselves when they play the Chiefs. And that's the point.
They're deviating from tendencies. They're doing things nowhere to be found on film.
"Our staff, we're pretty much dead on when we feel that we're going to get something," Bieniemy said, "but there are no absolutes in anything in this game. We prepare our guys to expect the unexpected."
The unexpected has so often become the norm this season. It comes with the territory. When Chiefs coaches warned they would take an opposition's best shot now that they're the defending Super Bowl champions, it wasn't just lip service. It's playing out week after week.
The Panthers arrived in Kansas City ready to take any and every shot they could. "He had the machine gun loaded," Reid said of Panthers coach Matt Rhule.
Rhule went for three fourth-down conversions ... and got them all. Set the tone early. Went for it on fourth-and-3 on the opening drive. Scored a touchdown on the play.
But it stretched beyond some decisions to keep the offense on the field. The Panthers tried to catch the Chiefs by surprise. Rhule called a fake punt on his second offensive drive, and then later said he had planned on calling it on the opening drive, but they never needed it as they marched down the field for a touchdown. He later called a surprise onside kick midway through the fourth quarter.
He called, in other words, the unexpected.
"I anticipate we'll get that from teams," Reid said. "It keeps you on your toes, and that's a good thing."
The Chiefs' domination is going to induce aggression. It's going to motivate teams to try to steal a possession here and there.
The Ravens did it early last season with fourth-down calls and two-point conversion attempts. Ravens coach John Harbaugh said they played it like any other game, even as the statistics indicated that wasn't entirely accurate.
But never has it become so regular. The Panthers weren't the first. They won't be the last. In some cases, teams are saving some plays specifically for Chiefs Week. After the Raiders beat the Chiefs in Week 5, defensive lineman Chris Jones said, "They came out with some formations we haven't seen on film. They caught us off guard a little bit."
Think about that. Through four weeks, the Raiders kept some formations hidden from film, only to roll them out in Kansas City.
It's an evident sign that some teams have decided a victory against the Chiefs means a little bit more than it might against anyone else. So why not save the playbook beforehand? Why not exhaust everything you have once that day arrives?
"That was just more of a 'hey what else can you do in the game?' " Rhule said this weekend. "We came to win. We came to play to win. We wanted to get a win and tried to play that way."
The trick plays — or those you can really only use once per season — are in every team's script. Nobody has more of them than the Chiefs. We all remember Smoked Sausage, Ferrari Right and Catch and Release. And that's just this season.
But teams are eating them up at a high volume against the Chiefs, a trend they don't anticipate will change anytime soon.
Instead, they must answer this: How do you prepare for something you've never seen?
"Always have a contingency plan," Bieniemy said. "So when it's all said and done with, we want our guys to feel confident about going into each and every game but also make sure if there's a look that they haven't quite seen, make sure we utilize our rules, focus on our fundamentals and allow ourselves to execute with great attention to detail."
