Yes, but much of the offensive struggles come from turnovers and untimely penalties. Obviously Andy isn't encouraging those mistakes.

They turned it up offensively in the playoffs but you have to remember that Miami and Buffalo were both beat up defensively and put up little resistance. The offense still struggled in the red zone against Miami, not by design. They played well against Baltimore in the first half but got shutout in the 2nd half. The Super Bowl was the other way around. Bad first half but got it going in the 2nd half. Even in the SB though, they had two turnovers that could have cost them the game.

So yeah, Reid holds back some plays offensively but the mistakes are not deliberate and the injuries have accounted for much of the conservative offense this season. Cut their turnovers in half and this offense would be looking much better this year. Same with the red zone inefficiency. A few more TDs instead of FGs and the offense looks much better overall.

It's really not a cope at all. Our eyes can see it and the boots-on-ground reporters back it up.

Andy would blow his load during his first 20 years all within the first couple months and then defenses would seem to figure the O out. It just looks different to me in recent years. I'm sure some of that is just getting the other team's full focus of every week, but whatever it is, it leads to their best performances when it's needed most.

Wut? When did this happen?

So next season when they're hopefully fully healthy and come out of the game scoring 30 again, are you guys going to change your narrative again? You can just say the offense hasn't played well but will likely get better as the season goes along and if we had another piece or two. Pretending like they're purposefully tanking offensive production is silly.

10-20 years from now, analysts, reporters, and players are going to be lauding Andy on podcasts and other bits of media for dragging these teams to wins and Super Bowls when we were outmatched talent-wise multiple times.

So wait, it is injuries and trying to figure it out or are they holding things back and they don't need to play well cause the defense is awesome? Can't have it both ways.

Yeah, if we had a healthy Rice, Brown, Worthy, Pacheco, I'd be curious to know how Andy would hide the offense? Run WR screens and 3 TE sets all season? I imagine they'd be airing it out now if not for the current personnel.

If you wanna say they're pulling the reigns a bit because of injuries, sure, I'd buy that.

But the other stuff? Nah. They're not playing how they want on offense.

Yes you can.

Pretty obvious that a lot of the playbook was cut out with the losses of Rice and Hollywood. Losing Pacheco and relying on Steele for a few weeks didn’t help. They also had a massive problem at LT with Kingsley which has slowly gotten better.

But it’s still painfully obvious that Andy is running old plays. In the playoffs they have new wrinkles added that they don’t show in the regular season.

Sure, but they simply aren't executing simple things either. Remember how many straight non scoring drives we had between the end of the AFCC and beginning of the Superbowl? Was that "holding back" too?

We are very fortunate for this defense

I don’t think they are holding back like the LeBron analogy. They had plans to have a great offence to complement an elite defense, but injuries stood in the way. So they are basically taking what they are given, they are also playing poorly in a relative sense with the excessive number of giveaways, penalties, and in some of the games, bad decisions by Mahomes. Given their injury situation at WR and the talent they have at RB (amazing how hunt came in when Pacheco went down) and the fact they have an elite defense, they have definitely turned to more of a running game.

But this is all about doing what makes the most sense in the situation that they are currently in , in my view, and not about purposefully holding back. True. Mahomes is not taking as many chances with his health as he used to because he has matured as a quarterback and realizes he doesn’t have to, and that it is risky.

All that has come together, and we are undefeated, despite many close calls. If our offence had of been able to live up to its potential before the injuries, this team would’ve been an unbelievable juggernaut.

If we beat San Francisco, and I certainly believe we can and will, I don’t see who’s going to defeat us this year. I can’t imagine we’ll go undefeated so someone will. But it will be
A trap game or a game at the end of the season when we are playing all substitutes because we don’t need to win.

They aren't holding shit back. They're just winning a different way. End of story.

I agree, but….. the issue was that early in the season you can see mahomes and Reid putting an emphasis on opening up the offense. Even with better pieces mahomes looks like he’s missing that gear he used to have. He was double clutching, holding onto the ball, skittish in the pocket, tunnel vision to the lower ADOTs. It’s not alarming, it just feels like something mahomes needs to work through. While we may limit our sets, Reid and spags will often find things to work on and make them points of emphasis early on.

What we did in NO will work. But I think we’ll will regress to a mean to ugly games like earlier in the year. We have the defense and running game to manage games this way. But I’d st

They're not executing or scoring how they want no, but what I'm saying is Andy isn't gonna show his best cards in October in order to make it better.

They'll either clean it up with penalties and execution or they won't, but either way, they save wrinkles and new stuff for gotta have it moments.

They do it every year. They'll run that same FB trap play every damn time on 4th and 1, and then it'll be late in the AFCCG and they'll have some spin off of it we've never seen that works to perfection.

I mean even corn dog was a relatively new thing.

I absolutely believe if this D wasn't elite and we needed 30+ ppg to win, then Patrick Mahomes would be playing at an MVP level. He knows he doesn't have to, so he doesn't play as good. I'm sure dragging this team got pretty exhausting, so now that he doesn't have to he's gonna let the D do it.