Taylor Swift is welcome ‘all she wants,’ but KC’s most dynamic duo is Mahomes and Kelce

For all the data Chiefs coach Andy Reid processes and retains, you can still bet this trivial tidbit is beyond him: In the four Chiefs games Taylor Swift has attended, Travis Kelce as of Sunday has averaged 108 receiving yards ... compared to just 46.5 in his other games.

Just the same, Reid offered a sense of the spirit of things after Kelce on Sunday matched a regular-season career-high with 12 catches for 179 yards in the Chiefs’ 31-17 win over the visiting L.A. Chargers.

“Taylor can stay around all she wants,” Reid said, smiling.

Playfulness aside, though, for the umpteenth time this day was about the other unfathomable tandem: Kelce and Patrick Mahomes, who threw for 424 yards and four touchdowns as the Chiefs improved to 6-1.

In beating an AFC West foe for the 46th time in the last 52 meetings, the Chiefs now are a staggering 29-3 in division games started by Mahomes.

If the result was predictable enough, so, too, was Mahomes’ inclination to lean on Kelce — which might logically have rendered them less effective.

Kelce had amassed 100-yard-plus games in three of their last four meetings with the Chargers, after all, including a three-touchdown performance last season and the only time in his career he racked up more yards than Sunday (191 on Dec. 16, 2021, in Los Angeles).

“This isn’t, like, a secret,” Reid said.

Which is what made Sunday all the more spectacular and, to some degree, even inexplicable.

Not to mention a reminder that it’s hard to picture anything aligning quite like this between them ever again.

Meanwhile, their work also helped Mahomes connect with nine other targets on a reassuring day for an evolving offense that had scored more only once this season — 41 points against the 2-5 Bears.

For what it’s worth, it’s not like the Chargers were out of the loop here, even if it was often stunning how open Kelce got — especially with nine catches for 143 yards in the first half.

“What you have to be able to do is you have to make it tough on him,” Chargers coach Brandon Staley said last week. “You have to make sure that you’re mixing the coverages up, the matchups, and making him have to earn all of the catches that he gets.

“When you’re playing against a premium player, that’s what you want to do. If there are enough targets, there are going to be some catches, but we can make sure that they’re tough catches, that they’re contested.”

But … nah.

With considerable help from the Chiefs’ offensive line, the inevitable, inimitable and irresistible force that is Mahomes-Kelce often made the Chargers defense look like it had no idea they could even be a thing.

As usual, that’s because they’re both spectacular talents that almost seem to operate as one organism when they’re playing together. In some ways, you’d be hard-pressed to know where one mind ends and the other begins with their abilities to create in real-time.

Because as intricate as the offense is, it allows room for Mahomes and Kelce to animate it in their own way.

When I asked Reid Sunday about how much was scripted vs. how much was impromptu, he blurred the answer by calling it a combination. But he also offered a telling distinction about how they’re empowered.

“They kind of know where the green lights are (and) where the red lights are with the flexibility of the play …” he said.

Pausing for effect, he added that they take advantage of a “long yellow light.”

All of which puts their game in neon lights, this dream matchup of a generational quarterback and a former quarterback who sees the field through that lens and has navigated about every defensive look there is.

To say nothing of Kelce’s uniquely nimble, swivel-hipped ability to change directions and accelerate for a man of his size.

“It’s almost like he’s playing ‘Madden,’” said Mahomes, referring to the popular video game. “He can read the coverage and stop in the windows and be open and be on the same page as me at all times …

“It seems like he does it week-in and week-out, and that’s why he’s the player that he is and he’ll be a Hall of Famer one day.”

To be sure, Kelce was great playing with Alex Smith, Mahomes’ fine and underappreciated predecessor.

But this connection has become a phenomenon as the sort of rare pair that will live in perpetuity — not just in Chiefs lore, but in the annals of the NFL.

Heck, they’re trending toward a place in the history of dynamic duos of any sort.

We’ve written often about the sort of cosmic connectivity between them, but Sunday provided a few new cases in point.

When Kelce failed to hang on to a pass in the second half, it ended what Next Gen Stats determined had been a streak of 28 completions in 28 targets. That defied any logic, per its calculations that there was merely a 1 in 3,000 chance (0.03%) of that happening, based on the probability of each attempt.

It’s all the more absurd when you factor in the ad-lib element of their connection. It’s worthy of an improv studio.

In this case, that’s the practice field, where Mahomes noted that Kelce refuses to take a play off even at his advanced NFL age of 34 as of Oct. 5.

That’s where the chemistry is built, after all, including both the painstaking understanding of essential schemes but also where they can deviate. And that seeming paradox is the essence of Mahomes to Kelce, as Mahomes described in one sequence on Sunday.

With Kelce open in the middle of the field, albeit as the second or third option on the play, Mahomes began to run upfield as the pocket collapsed and drew defenders his way.

From “there is nothing telling you I was going to do that” to “Do it, Kels!” episodes in dramatic postseason games, we’ve seen (and heard) them change on the go many times.

But the nuance to this one was that Kelce … stayed put

“Whenever he’s open, he doesn’t get himself covered,” said Mahomes, who was alert to the seeming contradiction. “I say that, and it sounds funny. But a lot of times if you’re supposed to run a route a certain way, (receivers are) going to keep running the route and they’ll go through the window.

“And in this offense Coach Reid gives them the freedom that if you’re open, stay there. Don’t … run the route like we ran in practice 1,000 times. He does a great job with that. It sounds simple. But it’s something he’s really mastered.”

All that and what Staley called the “eye contact, that chemistry of feeling space and areas” between the two helps explain why you can know it’s coming, prepare accordingly … and still be confounded.

And fun and strange and excessive as the Kelce-Swift hype has been, the most compelling magic around the Chiefs remains the duet between Kelce and Mahomes.

“We always talk about it,” Mahomes said.

He was speaking of the dynamics between them … yet something more.

“But,” he added, “it’s something that you can’t take for granted.”