HappyDays

Lions don't have a prayer of beating the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. Go 49ers.

I don't really blame Lamar there. His blindside got blown up. It is just that the Chiefs players are all stepping up, like they do every year.

Every single player on the Chiefs plays at their absolute best in the playoffs. It's uncanny.

Discussion starts here:

Mahomes has been perfect in this game.

They weren't trying to sack him, just playing contain. Which is probably the smart move. But Kelce is the GOAT. What are you gonna do?

They do this every year. Their defense has risen above their regular season play every year since Spagnuolo was hired. Their offense is doing it this year. Elite coaching wins playoff games.

Reid is still the GOAT, man. The 1st play of the drive, Mahomes has basically a high/low read but the low is all the way over by the sideline while Rice is sitting inside the hashes. As soon as the defender moves to cover the low, Rice has all that space in front of him.

Excellent drive. Make those defensive adjustments and keep these punks out of the Super Bowl.

Jackson has to be better than that. Looks like he had a couple pass catchers open there.

Probably more complicated than this, but why not double Kelce with a safety and a LB? I never see teams try this. Make literally anybody else on the offense beat you.

That's an insane catch. At no point on that route was Kelce open. There's simply nothing Hamilton could have done better there.

That's a flat out drop.

Sure, comfortable. I'm glad our discussion once again turned into a semantics game.

I'm just saying there is a reason Hamlin got the ball there. I don't believe it was a matter of picking the best football player for the situation. You're mistaking what I mean when I say play it safe. I actually think McDermott's 4th down decision making and that sort of thing is as aggressive as it should be. It's more about his gameplans, the players he chooses to start, the players he chooses to rely on in critical moments. It is those high level situations where I think he plays it safe to the detriment of the team. Hiring Brady without even trying to do better is a good example of this.

I think in McDermott's own way that was playing it safe. Giving Hamlin of all people the ball in that moment, I bet McDermott thought that it felt like destiny.

One thing I will say in Beane's defense on this is that every GM has these misses. Just look at the Chiefs under Brett Veach. They used a 1st round pick on a RB which is a cardinal sin of modern football, and worse that RB didn't even turn out to be a good player. This past offseason they also failed to sign Hopkins, instead choosing to give out a massive contract to a RT which again is a cardinal sin, and again the RT didn't turn out to be a good player. These two awful mistakes could have sunk the team. But the Chiefs happen to also have an elite coaching staff, so they have more than overcome it. Or look at the Eagles. Most people consider Howie Roseman to be the best GM in football. But his team was undone late in the season and then in the playoffs because of poor coaching. So I guess looking at the totality of Beane's work in recent years I think overall it is actually pretty good relative to other Super Bowl contenders. Coaching, especially in the playoffs, is where we are seeing a big discrepancy between us and the other contenders IMO.

I hate this. I don't necessarily hate that Brady got the job. But I hate that the team didn't even attempt to complete a full and exhaustive search. We're just running it back. McDermott loves playing it safe. It's what holds him back as a coach more than anything.

Yeah imagine if we had an offense that scored TDs on 12 out of 16 drives in the playoffs. Surely that offense would make it past the divisional round. No way the defense could spoil such an impossibly great performance.

I wouldn't re-sign him next offseason unless he gives us a big hometown discount. Nothing to do with Spencer Brown the player, we just don't have the luxury of giving big contracts out to non-premium positions like RT while paying a franchise QB contract. Keep drafting RTs in rounds 2-7 and always have a pipeline of young talent there. I worry Beane will feel the need to extend him to highlight him as a draft success.

Yards per play given up in each of our last 5 playoff losses (kneeldowns excluded): Chiefs 2024 - 8.5 Bengals 2023 - 6.0 Chiefs 2022 - 7.6 Chiefs 2021 - 7.4 Texans 2020 - 5.6 As a point of reference, the worst defense in the league this gave up 6.0 yards per play. Our best effort on here, 5.6 yards per play, would have ranked 27th. So there are two possibilities to finally break through in the playoffs. Either our defense stops giving up historically bad yards per play, or we build up our offensive supporting cast so that it can consistently produce historically great yards per play. It's very hard to win games when your yards per play differential is negative.

Also I want to mention I'm not discrediting how great Mahomes is at all. He is still the most responsible individual in the Chiefs organization for their results over the past 5 years. I just hate that in these conversations of Allen vs Mahomes it always comes down to Mahomes' Super Bowls. Like I said before, I get it. It is hard to break down results to more than just the result. But looking at the Chiefs and Bills over the past three seasons, I think it is plainly obvious that the QBs have been about equal while the totality of other players and coaches heavily favors the Chiefs. Do you believe Mahomes in last year's playoffs performed measurably better (not even in statistics, just in general his actual play on the field) than Allen did in the 2022 or this year's playoffs? Do you believe the Bills would beat the Joe Burrow Bengals if Allen at any point in the game led his offense to 4 consecutive drives with just 3 total points scored (which came off of a short field) one of which ended in a turnover at midfield?

What hypothetical did I make up? The exact game scripts that I pulled for the Chiefs playoff run last year? Those aren't hypotheticals. They really happened. I think if people are honest with themselves they'll admit that those exact game scripts performed by Allen on the Bills would lead to a loss in at least one of those three games. So what separates the QBs in terms of their legacy and accolades is not just QB play. It is mostly to do with the situations around them. I find it weird that I get any pushback on this concept. Everybody here knows QBs are responsible for at most 50% of the game's outcome, right? So when you're talking about an elite QB versus a replacement level QB the elite QB will almost always win. But elite versus elite, it comes down to every other factor.

I'll admit it's hard to objectively evaluate head coaches. It's not like players where there are clear stats to look at, and it can be hard to differentiate between when a play fails because of a player versus when a play fails because of a coach. Still I try to take the individual components into account when I evaluate McDermott. I don't think he is a bad coach, I just question if he is a top 5 coach which is likely what you need to win a Super Bowl.

And yet you inadvertently agreed with my point about the single game QB production, and haven't tried to dispute anything else I said in that post. I get it. Most people are results-based thinkers. It takes a lot of brain power to look beyond the final result and evaluate the individual components.