Do the Kansas City Chiefs have the NFL version of Houdini? One player on the team seems to think so.
Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes pulled a rabbit out of his hat against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with a two-yard touchdown pass to Clyde Edwards-Helaire in Week 4. If you were told to look at a still of the play and guess the result without knowing it ended up as a touchdown, you’d probably pick an entirely different outcome.
Maybe you’d guess that Mahomes was tackled behind the line of scrimmage by Devin White for a sack. Maybe you’d guess that he’d throw the ball away and live to fight for third-and-goal.
— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) October 3, 2022
Instead, Mahomes hits a 360-spin to get out of the sack and Clyde Edwards-Helaire vacates his spot to find the empty space in the back of the endzone. Mahomes flicks the ball to him on a pseudo-jump pass and the rest is history.
Chiefs TE Travis Kelce has been playing with Mahomes for six seasons now and he had quite the take about the play and his quarterback after the game.
“The NFL hasn’t seen anything like Pat Mahomes, I promise you that,” Kelce said. “And you saw it tonight. He’s the Houdini of our era, man. The guy just finds ways to make plays throughout the game. I mean, big-time third downs, big-time goal line plays. Just willing our team into the end zone and willing our team to win. That’s our ultimate leader man.”
Mahomes himself didn’t really chalk the play up to anything Houdini-like when he explained the play after the game. He said that he’s simply just out there trying to win.
“We rolled out and they did a nice job of coming upfield and not going on that dive-play that we kind of always run with (Mike) Burton,” Mahomes said. “I was able to use my little bit of speed to get around the edge there. I was going to run for it and they kind of flew around and I realized I wasn’t going to make it and I saw Clyde (Edwards-Helaire) and so I flicked it up to him.”
He just was caught with a split-second decision where he had to decide to commit to running the ball himself or passing it.
“I think the spin kind of made me decide to throw it again,” Mahomes said. “I knew once I spun I wasn’t going to have the speed to get there. Before I was thinking about going to the pylon, but once I spun I realized that Clyde was open.”
Another angle of the play in real-time shows just how ridiculous it was.
One more angle of that ridiculousness. @PatrickMahomes @Chiefs pic.twitter.com/iOhQFXLCyh
— NFL (@NFL) October 3, 2022
Whether he thinks so or not, the football-watching world was amazed by what Mahomes was able to accomplish during that play. It was far from the mundane. It’s the Mahomes magic that we’ve all become accustomed to seeing over the years, but we can’t take plays like that for granted.
“Yeah, just the fact that he knew where he was spinning to was good enough for me,” Chiefs HC Andy Reid said of the play. “And to be able to get it off and complete it. For 25 (Clyde Edwards-Helaire) to get his feet in was good too. There wasn’t a lot of room there. He has a lot of phenomenal plays and I always remind the coaches, don’t take it for granted, man. Those things, that’s special. So enjoy every one of those, man. You just don’t see that very often.”
