Time to panic about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs? Separating fact from fiction

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

Where is Pat going here in this pocket? pic.twitter.com/qEgo2DEGc3

— Danny (@JewellHawks) November 2, 2021

He's got the yips

I take it back on this. I actually think he made a pretty smart play. Barring an obvious TD completion, or easy pass in bounds, the next best thing BY FAR was going down in bounds. An incomplete pass or going OOB w/o scoring was a disaster there. NY was out of timeouts and going down in bounds allowed us to run 45-50 seconds of the clock, which was huge because it put a ton of pressure on Jones that he didn't handle well.

Under normal circumstances Mahomes should stay in the pocket and wing it to Pringle coming open by the pylon. But he'd have to put that in a tight window and there's a high % of incompletion. Or he could throw it to Kelce coming across, but the spy was effectively clogging the passing lane - meaning Mahomes would have to do some kind of side-arm magic or jump pass, which is also not high probability.

So by rolling out he could try to maybe run it in, or find a more high % completion either to Kelce (which is fine if he doesn't score as long as he stays in bounds) or Pringle with a much better angle. Or worst case scenario just eat it, like he did.

You can tell Mahomes knew all this by the way he went down under pressure. Even if NY had one timeout it's a very different situation than knowing you can run that much time off the clock. Dude is just a genius about situational football. Sometimes I wonder if Reid or Bienemy even tell him this stuff before the play - or he just knows.

Mahomes went out of his way in a presser a few weeks ago to praise Tyreek for not trying to reach for the pylon. I feel like he's coaching the offense as much as Reid and Bienemy sometimes. Dude called the biggest play in modern Chiefs history himself, then coached Hill and Watkins in the huddle on how to play it.