Andy Reid's baffling approach to Browns game hurts Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs

The Kansas City Chiefs improved their overall record to 13-1 on Sunday and continue to be in the driver's seat for a first-round bye in the AFC. Their 21-7 win over the Cleveland Browns was their largest margin of victory of the season. Given those two factual statements, it might seem unfair to come away from the game frustrated by the decisions of the head coach, but here we are.

Let me preface by saying that Andy Reid is a legend. He's arguably the number two most valuable part of this Chiefs dynasty behind quarterback Patrick Mahomes. He's a surefire Hall of Famer once he retires and you can make a strong argument that he's already on the Mount Rushmore of coaches in NFL history. I'm incredibly grateful that Reid is the Chiefs coach, and he has forgotten more about football than I'll ever know.

But...

Reid's decisions on Sunday against the Browns hurt the Chiefs more than they helped them. It would be easier to sweep those decisions under the rug and appreciate where this team stands if his absurd approach to the game hadn't gotten their all-world quarterback hurt. The Chiefs have to play two more games in the next 10 calendar days and now Patrick Mahomes is getting tests on his ankle. Yes, injuries can happen on any play, but Mahomes getting banged up was both preventable and completely unnecessary given the situation.

The Chiefs may have improved to 13-1 on the season, but their head coach still deserves criticism for how they went about it on Sunday.

We'll come back to Reid's offensive approach in the second half and how it directly led to Mahomes' injury in a second. Let's back up for a second to the first half first. The Chiefs should have walked into halftime with a huge lead if they had been mildly competent on offense. The Chiefs punted on 4 of their 5 first possessions, with the only exception being the drive where they recovered a fumbled punt on Cleveland's 21-yard line.

The miserable execution was bad enough, but Reid's biggest first-half blunder came in the closing minute. The Chiefs were moving the ball and looked poised to get in the end zone and make it 21-0 at the half. After coming up just short of the sticks on second down near the 10-yard line (with a little under a minute to go and all three timeouts), Reid let the clock tick and then ran straight ahead to try for the first down. When that failed, he lined up to go for it on fourth down but changed his mind after a Browns timeout.

I wish that was the end of the coaching malpractice in the first half, but it was clear Reid didn't have a clear plan going in, because when he changed his mind, the field goal unit wasn't ready. It would've been nice to see Harrison Butker make that short field goal, but the rushed operation didn't set them up for success. The Chiefs went from a great chance to go up 21-0 to getting nothing and staying at 14-0 instead.

Those extra points would have likely put the Chiefs in the correct mindset of eating the clock by running the ball on a rainy afternoon when the Browns' offense couldn't get anything going. Instead, Reid inexplicably kept dropping back to pass in the second half over and over AND OVER. It would have been a bad plan even if it had been working, but it wasn't working at all.

The Chiefs weren't even making safe, short throws to keep moving the chains (and more importantly the clock); instead, they were chucking the ball deep downfield with almost no success. Again, I wish that was the end of the frustrations, but the other side effect was that it was exposing Patrick Mahomes to numerous shots that simply weren't necessary.

Given that Mahomes finally came up limping heavily after a particularly nasty shot in the 4th quarter, it feels completely fair to criticize the coach for his approach to a game that was both ineffective and completely unintuitive for the situation.

To Reid's credit, they did a great job of containing Myles Garrett throughout the game, but they could have made that job even easier too by running the ball more and running passes that were designed to get the ball out faster. If ever there was a game where a run game mixed with Andy Reid's signature screens to both running backs and wideouts would have made sense, it was this one. The weather was cooperative and the Chiefs were already up by a couple of scores. Instead, the team called for numerous shots down the field that weren't landing and plays that took long enough to develop that it put the quarterback in harm's way. Reid called this game like he was trading blows with another elite high-scoring offense, not a Browns team that put up a rock-bottom performance.

I love Andy Reid. He deserves a place in the hearts of Kansas City's fans for the rest of his life for what he has accomplished with the Chiefs. He has this team ready to compete for a possible third straight Super Bowl. However, that doesn't mean fans don't have the right to complain when his coaching decisions don't make logical sense, fail to work out, and lead to the team's most important player getting hurt right before the final grueling stretch of the regular season.