About 45 minutes or so into our conversation, Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy hit me with a point of clarification—in the bedlam of the postgame locker room, he and I had gone over Kansas City’s fourth-and-1 play call, and I was actually a bit off in how I saw it.
I’d asked if it was a zone-read concept. He said it was. Technically, conceptually, that wasn’t wrong. But he told me Friday that he’d actually mixed up the call with Patrick Mahomes’s big run earlier in Super Bowl LVIII, one that chewed up 22 yards in the third quarter and set up Harrison Butker’s 57-yard field goal. That one, it turns out, was the run-pass option play. The later one, on maybe the biggest snap of the entire game, was just made to look like one.
To me, in the moment, they looked pretty much identical.
