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Obviously, the primary credit for this game goes to Mahomes and Reid/Bienemy.
Mahomes' second half is the stuff of legend. 93% completion rate and scoring every drive on a badly injured ankle? This wasn't Mahomes' "flu game" in Jordan lore. Jordan's flu game was his "ankle playoffs" in Mahomes lore. We've never seen anyone like him, and you could argue that he's on GOAT trajectory.
Personally, the way I see this team: there's going to be minimal free agency losses. Veach has 11 draft picks, and all the cap space he wants. He's almost certainly going to return Jones and Brown. This team, with the experience all these rookies have racked up, and let's just be negative and say Veach's next draft class is merely "above average": this team could potentially threepeat. It's ridiculous.
But Reid/Bienemy were gods. The last two touchdowns were scored by Reid/Bienemy. Bienemy needs to do the smart thing here and march on to Washington or Baltimore and run his own offense for a couple years and dunk on the NFL for passing him up. But he and Reid completely negated the passrush by flipping passes over their heads to wide open receivers. And then they ran the Alex Smith offense at the start of the 2nd half and let the OL lean into power and let Pacheco cook.
Veach's ability to make the passing attack flexible was his greatest accomplishment this offseason. He did great work in the 7th round, and of course he rebuilt the entire secondary in the draft.
But Toney was the WR1 against the Jags, MVS WR1 against the Bengals, JuJu the WR1 against the Eagles. Teams don't have a WR that they have to take away, because the Chiefs can just go somewhere else. Add in a psychopath at QB who works his fingers bloody getting every WR onboarded perfectly into the offense and you just have an unstoppable machine.
I am tempted for this team to trade for Hopkins, or go get this guy or that guy.
But Veach signed JuJu for $5m. I think MVS' cap hit this year was $3m. Skyy, Watson, Toney, Hardman, all on rookie contracts.
Maybe that's what Veach needs to do -- kind of what the Giants did with Eli Manning. Keep the cupboard stocked with 2nd round picks at WR.
2 sacks the entire game from the #1 and #2 passrushes: I think both OLs worked their ass off but for the most part, this was an absurdly slippery field and removed most of the sudden moves that beat bigger, slower OL like Brown and Wylie.
I think we all anticipated that Spags would clog the LOS, I didn't anticipate they'd play the read option so damn well. Bolton and Sneed were waiting for Hurts every single time he tucked it. Didn't always work, but Spags had them in position the entire time.
The thing that most surprised me was that Spags didn't blitz a ton. He bet on having the deep passes double-covered. Hurts still made some plays against that, particularly in the intermediary, but DBs were in position almost every single time. The tackling as well was stupendous from both teams: there was almost no RAC yards.
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