Arrowhead Pride
The aspects of Reid’s gameplan that stuck out against Buffalo in the AFC Championship.
For the first time all season, the Kansas City Chiefs put up 30 points on an opponent. After working through what exactly they wanted their offense to look like, the Chiefs put together all the components of what they are in 2024; an efficient machine that can attack defenses every way underneath without creating explosive plays.
I thought the game against the Bills demonstrated every part of that vision. What I found interesting about the game is that the Chiefs only had nine third-down plays all game. Despite some concerns about beating man coverage from the last game and Buffalo’s pass rush, Andy Reid crafted a great game plan that used all of the offense's growth in 2024.
Let’s break down some of the things Reid was doing to help the offense on early downs:
One of the biggest components to the offense succeeding this week was Mahomes using his legs as a runner, but it wasn’t necessarily him creating. Mahomes didn’t need to wear the superhero cape and create first downs with his legs. Instead, Reid leveraged Mahomes’s legs with his playcalls to gain an advantage.
Sprintouts were a huge part of this. I love it when the Chiefs move the pocket for Mahomes. It allows him to avoid muddiness in the pocket and flash the insane arm talent he has. He can access any angle on the move, so you can have layers of reads that allow him to quickly work from the frontside to the backside. It also takes the teeth out of a pass rush. They can’t get upfield, fearing Mahomes will be well off their rush path.
A lot of Mahomes’ scrambles were him just taking off on sprintouts, which gives him an easy edge, and without defensive linemen sprinting toward him. Defenders also can’t scream at him because Mahomes will flip the ball over their heads, and explosives happen. I thought that aspect of the gameplan was clever.
If the Chiefs have offensively improved in any one area this year, I think the run-pass option (RPO) game has improved dramatically. In this game, we saw Reid call as many RPOs as he has in any game in a long time. The tone for these were set in the opening drive, where Reid dialed two RPOs directly for Hollywood Brown. Xavier Worthy ran two different motions to get indicators on the coverage. The first was zone coverage, so Brown sat down, and Mahomes hit him quickly. The second was man coverage, and Brown got inside on a slant.
Getting Buffalo’s defense to slow down and communicate what they were doing coverage-wise gave Mahomes straightforward answers. The Bills did a better job in the second half, forcing the run and stopping it with lighter bodies, but Mahomes was able to read the defense out with these RPOs and get the...
