Around 7:30 p.m. Sunday night, a collective cacophony of gasps, screams and sighs could be heard from the couches of most American households. Seconds before the rapture, the Kansas City Chiefs lined up for a third-and-16. The ball was snapped. Mahomes rolled right, looked back over the middle and fired it … right into the hands of Philadelphia Eagles rookie nickel cornerback Cooper DeJean.
A pivotal pick six in one of the most disastrous halves of Super Bowl football in recent memory, Mahomes’ misfire is a perfect example of a larger issue within the Chiefs’ offensive system under offensive coordinator Matt Nagy.
To preface, while Mahomes being pressured 42 times without facing a single blitz — the second most amount of times in Super Bowl history — is a sign of troubling O-line play, there are additional factors that should be considered in trying to understand what exactly went wrong.
And while I’d hate to point fingers here, a lot of Mahomes’ struggles in both Sunday’s game and the season overall stem from the system implemented by Nagy. If you do so much as look at Mahomes’ stats in the two seasons since Nagy was given the job, you’ll begin to see what I mean.
The issue is not how much Mahomes is throwing the ball but rather what he’s throwing. In the last two regular seasons, both his intended air yards per pass and completed air yards per completion are down significantly across the board. To put it simply, there is a stark decrease in how far down the field Mahomes is throwing the ball under Nagy’s system compared to under the previous offensive coordinator, Eric Bieniemy.
In theory, playing for shorter air yardage limits how many tough throws Mahomes has to make and can even open up the game for deeper throws when it matters the most. And though the Chiefs have gone 26–8 in the regular season over the last two years and even lifted a Vince Lombardi Trophy in 2023, they have been two of Mahomes’ worst statistically and performance-wise.
Although the offense has become more short pass-focused in the regular season, the opposite is true for the playoffs. This year, Mahomes recorded his highest playoff completed air yards per attempt of the last five years but also saw his lowest figures in net yards gained and completion percentage. While the Chiefs were looking to push the ball downfield, it just wasn’t working.
Once again, it’s a good idea in the right situation. It makes sense to try to generate explosive plays in the playoffs but not when you have a system in place to do the exact opposite. We saw it throughout Sunday night: Mahomes would look downfield, get through his reads, step up and then get sacked. All the Eagles had to do was run high school-level coverage; they had the better personnel to execute a better game plan.
Whether this is a fixable issue for the Chiefs is still unclear. To build the offense back to where it was in years like 2022 when Mahomes threw for over 5,000 yards en route to a second MVP, it will take a combined effort by the coaching staff and front office to acquire players that fit a new, improved system. If they don’t make this effort and instead just trust that their generational quarterback will carry them where they need to go, it will be easy for complacency to set in (see the Green Bay Packers for most of Aaron Rodgers’ tenure). It won’t be easy, but if the Chiefs want to become the NFL’s next true dynasty, they’d better get back to work.
