In the NFL, styles can make fights. The varying strengths and weaknesses across rosters, schemes, and philosophies can create exciting matchups with teams searching for an edge to exploit.
The Divisional Round matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills was billed as a heavyweight bout with expectations of two giants going toe-to-toe swinging haymakers. On the Sharp Angles Podcast, I likened it to a high-level luchador pro wrestling match. Two fast and insanely nimble athletes whipping out their craziest high-lying moves for the entertainment of the crowd.
At times in the thrilling 42-36 overtime Chiefs win, either of those analogies worked. There were times when both would have made sense at the same time. Here’s the thing about Patrick Mahomes: he is the style and he is the fight.
Mahomes can trade blows with the giants, he can wrestle if the fight is kept on the ground, and there is no one more electrifying when he hops up to the top rope.
He’s the type of quarterback you can tweet about saying there is too much time left on the clock with only 13 seconds remaining and not be sure how much you’re kidding. Turns out, 13 seconds was too much time.
Buffalo spent an entire offseason building up a roster, especially on the defensive side of the ball, that would be able to hang — and hopefully stop — Mahomes and the Chiefs. It worked in the Week 5 meeting when the Bills pulled out a 38-20 win. The plan even mostly worked on Sunday night.
In the simplest terms, the Bills wanted to be able to have a great defense that rushed four and played with two deep safeties in order to prevent the deep pass and keep enough defenders underneath to not leave routes open against pressure.
No team has done a better job at taking away the deep pass from the Chiefs than the Bills have over the past two seasons. Also, no defense defended the deep ball better as a whole in 2021 than the Bills, who allowed a completion on just 20% of deep passes. In the Divisional Round, only 2.3% of Mahomes’s passes traveled 20 or more yards past the line of scrimmage. That was the lowest rate for Mahomes in a full game played in his career. The only game lower came in Week 7 during the 2019 season when he was injured and left the game after 11 pass attempts, none of them deep.
This has been a trend in Mahomes’s career as defenses have sold out to stop the deep ball. Mahomes’s rate of 20+ air yard throws has decreased each season of his career from 15.6% in 2018 down to just 10.9% in 2021, including the playoffs. As a result, Mahomes and the Chiefs have picked their spots to let the ball rip down the field. Even with a decreased rate of throws, Mahomes still finished second in total EPA on deep passes during the 2021 season.
75% of Mahomes’s passes against the Bills on Sunday were short, 1-10 yards past the line of scrimmage. That was the highest rate of short passes in Mahomes’s career. The second highest (63.2%) came in last year’s AFC Championship Game — also against the Bills.
A number like that for other quarterbacks could reflect an inordinate amount of dump-offs and checkdowns, but for the Chiefs those were still wild throws perfectly executed to get receivers in space. On throws between 1-10 air yards, Mahomes went 24-of-33 for 221 yards and two touchdowns.
His touchdown throw to Byron Pringle to put the Chiefs up 14-7 inside the two-minute warning in the first half was technically just a 2-yard pass. Mahomes faced pressure right off the bat and scramble back to around the 15-yard line before he released the throw into the end zone.
Few quarterbacks are getting that pass away. Fewer are putting it accurately into the end zone. Throughout the game, Mahomes was able to get out of situations that would have been trouble for other passers. Mahomes was under pressure on 39.6% of his dropbacks, the 15th highest rate in a game for his career. Yet, that pressure didn’t really matter.
On 21 dropbacks under pressure, Mahomes went 9-of-13 for 165 yards and two touchdowns for 0.64 EPA per dropback. Since he became a full-time starter, Mahomes leads all quarterbacks in EPA per dropback under pressure (-0.05). So rarely is pressure a catastrophic result for Mahomes and the Kansas City offense. That’s especially true when there is pressure against extra pass rushers. In that situation since the start of 2018, Mahomes has averaged 0.25 EPA per dropback. The next highest quarterback, Philip Rivers is at 0.06 and he’s the only other quarterback with positive EPA.
Top Quarterbacks Under Pressure vs Blitz since 2018
data from TruMedia
| Quarterback | EPA per dropback |
|---|---|
| Patrick Mahomes | 0.25 |
| Philip Rivers | 0.06 |
| Justin Herbert | -0.01 |
| Dak Prescott | -0.08 |
That’s one of the other things about Mahomes to this point. Not only has he been adaptable to different styles in these types of games, he’s been a style dictator. NFL defenses have completely changed the way they play against the Chiefs in an effort to slow them down.
Mahomes’s production against the blitz has led to teams to basically stop sending extra rushers altogether and that’s exactly the plan the Bills followed. Mahomes was blitzed on just 11.3% of his dropbacks on Sunday night. But even with consistently keeping seven defenders in coverage, Mahomes did not force many passes — just 7.3% of his attempts were into tight windows, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
That’s another area where Mahomes has consistently succeeded throughout his career. While defenses have tried to make coverages as difficult as possible to throw against, Mahomes hasn’t forced the issue. He’s had among the lowest rates of tight window throws in each season of his career.
These are all, of course, things defenses plan for against Mahomes and the Chiefs. But there are also the things defenses can’t exactly plan for, like the pass to Travis Kelce that set up the game-tying field goal at the end of regulation.
After the game, Kelce and Mahomes both told reporters Kelce would stray from the called route and find open space if the Bills gave the look the Chiefs were expecting. Right before the snap, Mahomes gave Kelce the green light.
“DO IT”: Isolated and enhanced pic.twitter.com/7MKfHa9BzD
— Kali Mahomes (@ClayWendler) January 24, 2022
If styles do make fights, the opponent plays a big part in that. Many defenses have tried their best to stop Mahomes, but the combination of that defensive effort and an offense that can hang make for the best challengers.
The Bills and Josh Allen did just about everything they could. Mahomes and Allen finished first and second in EPA per dropback (0.49 to 0.47) in a weekend that only featured three quarterbacks with positive EPA (Matthew Stafford was the other).
Allen started the game slightly over adjusting to the Chiefs playing a similar defense to stop the deep pass and through three quarters only 5% of Allen’s throws were deep. Then in the fourth quarter, five of Allen’s 17 attempts (29.4%) traveled 20 or more air yards. Mahomes and the Chiefs forced Allen and the Bills to throw their best blows and they got exactly that.
We’ll see if that can carry over to Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Championship Game. We’ve already seen the potential against Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers. We’re in an era of incredible young quarterback play, yet they’re all still trying to keep pace with the one who keeps coming out on top.
Styles can make fights and to this point, no one has mastered more styles than Mahomes.
