They're all in a twist because they truly believe that if it had been Cam Newton at QB, the Chiefs would have gotten beat.

Seems like every week, it's a new gripe.

No team is perfect but this team is about as close as it gets.

Exactly. It was a sloppy game by both teams.

I did have a friend of mine that likes the 49ers tell me that the Chiefs are easily the best team and you have to play a perfect game to beat them and even then you may still lose. Then he discussed basically praying that a key player misses the game etc..

Lots of people have serious fear of the Chiefs.

Eh.

That 'congestion concept' BB wanted to use tonight showed up in a BIG way inside the red zone and it took some time for Reid to adjust to it. Especially when the running game couldn't punish the Pats in goal to go situations.

I mean the Chiefs had like 150 yards of offense in the 1st quarter. They weren't exactly tripping over themselves, they just couldn't finish drives because BB had a great plan in close early on. Score even 1 TD, let alone 2, and that whole narrative is a lot different.

I just think the idea that there was this overarching failure by the offense is overstating things. It was fine. They moved the ball well. BB just coached his ass off and REALLY did an excellent job in spots where we've seen the most development from the Chiefs over the last 18 months - situational defense.

3rd down and red zone stops. We've said for years that those are the two most critical areas in modern defensive football and it should come as a surprise to no one that the best defensive mind football has probably ever seen had his team playing extremely well in those 2 situations.

It happens.

What's baffling about this is we are generally a pretty creative offense. But we just kept running the same running plays over and over and over. It's not just that we weren't executing, but it's pretty easy to stop when you do the same thing every time. It made no sense why it took us 3 quarters to do something different and take the RB we drafted who is supposed to be good in space and, wait for it this is a crazy idea I can't believe it worked, put him in space instead of just pounding him up the middle. Not surprisingly the 2 best runs for CEH of the night were toss plays to the outside. Do that with mixing in some jet sweeps to keep defenses honest and that might help. Not "run up the middle every second down".

I also think it's obvious that unless they have to change it up the Chiefs are trying to win games showing the least amount of stuff on tape possible. This is about as vanilla as I can remember the Chiefs being on playcalling.

But you can almost always tell when he's moving with purpose vs. when he's just not getting comfortable.

He usually 'jutters' with his feet a little on the latter.

I saw very very little of that last night. And I saw none of those 'backward drifts' that you see when he's not feeling the pocket well.

I think just about every decision he made w/r/t pocket awareness was done with purpose. You're making a chicken/egg argument here. Yes, he succeeded when he was tall in the pocket. But then again, he had throwing lanes. Why are you presuming he had those when he was moving? Isn't it equally likely that he simply didn't have those lanes, tried to move to create them and then found himself stymied by the BB bracket concept?

I think you're identifying the symptom just fine - I think you're simply mis-diagnosing the disease.

They couldn't finish drives because they were making stupid penalties and getting the ball punched out and stuff. The first drive in particular had nothing to do with the Patriot defense and everything to do with Pat missing a couple of short throws.

Yeah, I'm not suggesting the offense "failed". They did leave some points on the field, regardless of the strength of the opposing defense.

This is a team that should be able to run some pretty clever inside trap plays, but unless I missed it, I saw few/none of them last night. I wonder if Osemele's lack of lateral agility and/or Wylie maybe not being at 100% prevented it.

With DE's bracketing and a light box....man, an inside trap should be REALLY easy to break. Especially w/ the threat of the pass making the DL need to hesitate just a tick more which would allow the G/T combo to get to the 2nd level a little easier.

Just not real sure why we didn't see more of those. Maybe we did and I missed 'em.

We saw an inside run to the left on the 1st series, CEH's first carry was for 5 or 6 yards. I don't remember seeing many more after that though.

Admittedly, I was feeding children and getting them hustled about to get to bed early so my focus was divided. I had my ear-bud in and was listening to the broadcast but wasn't always able to see the play.

But I think ultimately we're all extremely spoiled at this point. An 'average' offense is gonna leave 10 points on the field every damn week....if they're lucky.

I think there's a margin of acceptable error that, if we were outside of, it wasn't by as much as is being lamented.

Hats off to Bill Belichick for a good game plan, he seems to be the only coach in the league that can slow down Mahomes and company.

I wonder if Andy Reid held back a bit in regards to playcalling & adjustments knowing that he was facing Hoyer/Stidham, although the score was close for the majority of last night's game, it never really seemed like the outcome was in danger. Perhaps Andy didn't want to show his hand on how the Chiefs will counter the 3-man rush, with two edge defenders "boxing" him in look.

Food for thought.

Oh for sure.

I'm not bitching. In fact, I was one of the people telling everybody last night to calm the F down.

It was a fairly convincing win and if the offense plays up to its usual standard, the game is a blowout.

I'm sure a combination of factors - the 1 day delay, the absence of Cam, and more - led to both teams not playing their A game and it made it ugly.

But a win is a win.

Yeah I think those traps will almost have to be to the left because I don't think Osemele can pull over to the right side. So they'll need him to do that power block at the 2nd level while Wylie gets that pull in and takes out the 5-tech.

Pretty sure you can't flip those roles and do it to the right very often. I wonder if the shotgun impacts the timing there. But you would think if you had CEH lining up to Mahomes right, he could still be right on time to hit that hole as Wylie opens it.

Eh, Reid's a lot smarter than me so I suspect there's some reason for it that I wasn't seeing. It just seems like it can/should be a more common tool in our arsenal, especially on inside hand-offs.

Our OL isn't tough. They have faced very good defensive lines so far but our ground game is average at best. They just can't get a good push on the interior. CEH is getting stuffed over an over again.