How a Patrick Mahomes message and these offensive changes sparked Chiefs’ turnaround

Two weeks after the Cincinnati Bengals stunned the Chiefs in an AFC Championship Game a couple of seasons ago, Patrick Mahomes got an invitation. It came from friends.

The occasion? A Super Bowl party.

“I’m like, ‘Naw, I’m barely going to be able to watch it,’” he said.

Mahomes stayed home with his wife, Brittany, instead, though he did put the game on the TV. Couldn’t help it. “I’m a fan of football,” he said. But he paced in and out of the room, hardly able to stomach it.

That’s the part of the story he shared.

The part he didn’t: More than a week earlier, he had already begun his offseason training program. He was back in the gym with his trainer, Bobby Stroupe, just five days after the Chiefs blew that 18-point lead against Cincinnati — the only time in the past five seasons the Chiefs have missed the Super Bowl.

Five days later, back to work.

“His personality, he just wants to work to fix everything,” Chiefs wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling said. “Whenever he sees a problem — or not even a problem, but a solution — he wants to help be part of fixing it.”

It’s an across-the-board application. After the season. Before the season. During it.

Like, say, following the Christmas Day embarrassment against the Las Vegas Raiders. Earlier this week, Raiders owner Mark Davis apparently told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We kicked their (butt) here on Christmas Day.”

The one sentence reveals a lot — and not just that Davis seems to have forgotten that game was played in Kansas City. Perhaps when the Chiefs walk into Allegiant Stadium on Sunday — you know, to play in the Super Bowl — they’ll be greeted with a banner commemorating the Raiders’ Week 17 win.

A season highlight for the Raiders.

A season turning point for the Chiefs.

It’s pretty apparent now that a Chiefs team that got its, um, butts kicked on its home field is not the same team set to face the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas. As general manager Brett Veach told me earlier this week ahead of Super Bowl LVIII, “I think that was one of the most important weeks of the season for us. It allowed us to not take the game for granted.”

The question is how.

How did the Chiefs turn the worst offensive performance of the Mahomes era into their most valuable game of the season? How they turn it into yet another Super Bowl appearance?

It started with the messaging. Immediately after they returned to practice, Mahomes reminded the team that while there was plenty of talk about the effects of that loss on their chances to get the No. 1 seed, they hadn’t even clinched a spot in the playoffs yet.

It wasn’t just that the Chiefs lost the game. It was particularly ugly. Tight end Travis Kelce slammed his helmet on the bench just before halftime. Coach Andy Reid prevented an equipment staffer from returning it to him for a snap. All the while, play was ongoing and the Chiefs were being flagged for a penalty. (How fitting, right?) That was tucked that into one of the sloppiest two-minute drills in recent memory.

It required more than messaging to fix.

It required real change.

The Chiefs might’ve needed a wake-up call — it’s human nature to treat a home game against the Raiders with a little less importance when you’re on a streak of reaching every AFC Championship Game over the last half-decade. But more specifically, they needed that game to point them in the direction of what, exactly, to fix.

The coaches met alone first, without any players, and they set an objective to “make things easier for the players schematically,” offensive coordinator Matt Nagy said.

There’s a lot that goes into that comment, but most notably, the Chiefs’ pre-snap configuration had been a mess. A pre-snap alignment penalty had already cost the Chiefs one game. A series of them cost them another on Christmas. They were consistently late out of the huddle, and, guess what, when the pre-snap operation is out of sorts, it’s a bit harder to execute anything post-snap. Imagine that.

And it would only grow more difficult. That loss to the Raiders all but ended the Chiefs’ chances of securing homefield advantage in the postseason — meaning their playoff route would include pre-snap operations in hostile environments.

Had to be fixed. But how?

The coaches first elected to shorten the play-calls. Less verbiage in the huddle. They trimmed the substitution patterns. Fewer players coming in and out of the huddle. They made a point to send the play into Mahomes’ headset as quickly as possible. Less time in the huddle.

“Let’s make the hardest part of the game be once the ball is snapped,” said Joe Bleymaier, the team’s passing game coordinator. “Not the 30 seconds beforehand.”

I’ve delved into this topic before. But now that we have more than a small sample size, let’s step back for a moment and analyze the big-picture results.

Because they’re telling.

In their first 15 games of the season, the Chiefs committed 26 pre-snap or alignment penalties. That’s an average of 1.7 per game.

In the five games since the Raiders loss, the Chiefs have committed only two pre-snap penalties and zero alignment infractions. That’s 0.4 per game.

The offense? It was at 5.4 yards per play through 15 games. It’s at 5.9 yards per play since. If that doesn’t seem like much, it’s the difference between the third-best offense in the NFL and tied for 12th.

It’s a big change.

It’s the result of some big changes.

“If you eke that game out and you win, do you really have that moment where you realize how fragile everything is?” Veach wondered.

The Chiefs’ front office and coaching staff will have the offseason to assess why this iteration of the team was in need of an eye-opener — and how they can survive without one in the future. They’ll have an offseason to examine why this iteration couldn’t better grasp a more complex offense.

But because of one loss — because of their response to a low point — the Chiefs will have one more game to play before that offseason arrives.