The margin of difference between winning and losing in the National Football League is likely much thinner than any outsider can truly understand. Following the K.C. Chiefs‘ loss to the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, Kansas City’s offense looked like a Jekyll and Hyde transformation from one half to the next.
According to star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the team was just “off a tick.”
Such a description will likely draw the ire of some fans who would take exception to the surrender of a 21-3 lead as being “off a tick.” The inability to move the chains at all in the second half felt like a seismic shift from the first half. Yet to hear Mahomes talk to reporters about the game, it was clear that things can spiral out of control very quickly even if simple mistakes or adjustments are made—for better or for worse.
“When you’re playing a good team and you don’t hit what’s there and you try to get a bit more than what’s necessary, it bites you in the butt, I guess you would say,” said Mahomes to reporters. “It’s something where we were playing so well in the first half and in the second half, we were just off a tick. That’s all it takes to lose a football game.”
Patrick Mahomes described what went wrong for the Chiefs against the Bengals.
Mahomes is underplaying just how well the Chiefs were performing in the first half of the AFC Championship game. They absolutely had the Bengals on the ropes with successive defensive stops working in tandem with methodical touchdown drives on each of their first three series of the game. It wasn’t long before they were up by 18, and even just before halftime, they had a 21-10 lead with the ball on the goal line with time to run a couple of plays (before also getting the ball back after halftime).
Somehow the Chiefs didn’t score another point until they kicked a field goal to tie the game at the end of regulation.
The idea of the Chiefs playing slightly off in the second half sounds weird until you hear the quotes from the other side. Bengals defensive lineman B.J. Hill, who made a game-altering interception in the third quarter, told Peter King what changed for the Bengals after the half. He said, “We just stayed with our assignments and started playing better.”
That’s it? That quote makes it sound like a bowler who just needed a few warm-up tosses before throwing a perfect game, a reliever getting loose in the pen. But again, even on Cincinnati’s side, it was just a slight variance and things started clicking.
After the game, Mahomes told reporters that he spoke to his teammates about the emotional season they’ve had and that he’s “proud of them,” he said. And despite the postseason run and memorable performances
“I said I’m proud of those guys. If you look at the season that we had, to be in this game in general, this is definitely a special group of guys who have battled through adversity. But the leaders on this team know this isn’t our standard. We want to win a Super Bowl. Whenever you taste winning the Super Bowl, nothing less than that is a success.”
It’s also not lost on Mahomes that the team could be swimming in much more swag than they have now. “We’ve lost the AFC Championship, won the Super Bowl, lost a Super Bowl, then lost an AFC Championship. A few plays here and there, you could have four chances at the Super Bowl. So it’s definitely disappointing.”
At this point, all the Chiefs can do is ask and answer, to the best of their ability, some honest questions about their ceiling, their makeup, and what caused things to go off the rails—even a tick.
“”ere with this group of guys that we have, we expect to be in that game and to win that game. Anything less than that is not a success. So we’ll go back, look at all the things we did well, the adversity we battled through, the team that we became toward the end of the season, and try to learn from the mistakes we made and be better next year.”