The Kansas City Chiefs squeaked out a 27-24 victory over the Los Angeles Chargers on Thursday Night Football. The battle between Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert lived up to expectations to open up Week 2.
However, it wasn’t all positives for the Chiefs. A 99-yard interception return by seventh-round pick Jaylen Watson changed the game early in the fourth quarter when it looked like the Chargers would retake the lead.
The Chiefs are now 2-0, but there are still some question marks for Kansas City. Kayla Knierim, Cody Tapp, and Nick Schwerdt of Audacy's "It's Always Gameday In Kansas City" podcast talked about those issues after the Week 2 win.
“Probably offensive line communication. I’d like them to start quicker on defense rather than get picked apart early and then settle in, but offensive line communication feels like the obvious thing,” Tapp said (6:05 in player above).
Mahomes was only sacked once, but he was hit five times and the running game was also impacted by the offensive line for most of the game.
“My answer still lies with the offense and the offensive line,” Schwerdt agreed. “You can’t be the eighth-best offense, you gotta be one of the best offenses. I trust Mahomes. If he has time, he’s gonna find the receivers. Maybe Ju-Ju’s not Tyreek and he’s not going to be able to consistently be as big a part of the game plan week to week. That’s fine. But if he has time, he’s going to make it work. He had time last week, he was making some circus plays. The offensive line gets it together and I think a lot of our concerns are going to be alleviated regardless of what happens defensively.”
Tapp also brought up an important issue that the Chiefs have dealt with in the past: short-yardage situations.
“And then, honestly, the biggest problem I saw again in this game is I don’t know if they’re just going to have to find cute ways to get it or actually trust themselves to do it. This team, for the fourth consecutive year, stinks on short-yardage situations. Can’t get it done. Don’t trust themselves to get it done,” he said. “That’s why they kicked that field goal with Ammendola, they didn’t trust themselves to get the yard. If they did, they would’ve punched it in. But on the previous two 3rd & 1s, they didn’t get it. They got stopped. And when it came to that moment and Andy had a second to think about it, he decided to go the other way.”
If the Chiefs are going to be a Super Bowl contender, it’s going to be on Mahomes and the offense. It’s nice to have a defense that can step up and make plays to help win a game, but like most teams, the Chiefs need their offense to lead the way.
“In a perfect world – we always talk about this with teams that have great offenses – when the great offense isn’t playing great, like it wasn’t in the first half, we always sort of talk about how ‘Can the defense just bail you out for one game?’ And tonight they did,” Schwerdt said.
“I’m never going to have the highest expectations for this defense. If they can be top-15 in the NFL I won’t complain one bit. But the route to being a Super Bowl contender is always going to lie offensively,” he continued. “This team is a Super Bowl contender if they have one of the five best offenses in the NFL. It looked like that. It looked like that in the first game. They didn’t look like a top five offense in the NFL (on Thursday). But you still have Patrick Mahomes. He’s always going to make a few of those ‘I’m not from planet Earth’ type plays that are going to help win you games, which he did (Thursday night).”
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