Love y’all #ChiefsKingdom. This one hurts but we will be back! See y’all next year!
— Patrick Mahomes II (@PatrickMahomes) January 31, 2022
Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is shouldering the blame for his team’s overtime loss to the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC championship game.
Mahomes had a night and day difference between the first and second half of the AFC title game. In the first half, he was flawless, throwing for 220 yards, 3 touchdowns, no interceptions. In the second half and overtime, Mahomes threw for just 55 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions. It was nothing short of a meltdown for the talented young signal-caller.
“I’ve got to be better,” Mahomes said following the game. “When you’re up 21-3 at one point in the game, you can’t lose it. I put that on myself.”
But what happened in the second half that caused Mahomes to be so ineffective? Andy Reid said after the game that Cincinnati didn’t do much different, other than playing more man coverage on second down. Mahomes credited the Bengals with a good game plan as it related to his scrambling ability. They put a spy on him that limited how much he was able to get with his legs.
The real problem for Mahomes was something that plagued the Chiefs early on in the season. He passed over open plays underneath looking for plays that were open downfield. He got too aggressive.
“Just a few misreads here and there,” Mahomes said. “There were guys that were open. I didn’t hit it the right time or I passed up on something shorter because I wanted to get something deeper down the field. When you’re playing a good team and you don’t hit what’s there and try to get a little bit more than what’s necessary, it kind of bites you in the butt. We were playing so well in the first half, and in the second half we were just off a tick. And that’s all it takes to lose a football game.”
So where do the Chiefs go from here? Mahomes and the rest of the team hold themselves to a high standard and while they’ll look back on some good moments in this season, they know they missed out on an opportunity to reach the Super Bowl.
“You take away the good things, just like any season,” Mahomes said. “It’s definitely disappointing. With this group of guys that we have, we expect to be in (the Super Bowl) and to win that game. Anything less than that is not a success.
“We’ll go back and look at all the things we did well, the adversity we battled through, the better team that we became toward the end of the season. And we’ll try to learn from the mistakes that we made and try to be better next year.”
They’ll look to start again fresh next season and come back even stronger, but the team will certainly look different. That alone could yield different results, for better or for worse.
