Why the Chiefs won the Super Bowl
Kansas City's strategy looked dicy at moments, but ultimately it allowed for the Mahomes-Hurts duel which could only end one way.
My bet on Patrick Mahomes overcoming Jalen Hurts in a big game for the Super Bowl proved accurate, but is that really why the Chiefs won? Because Mahomes outplayed Hurts?
It was a close call. Here were the final lines for either player:
Patrick Mahomes: 21-27 for 182 yards at 6.7 ypa with three TDs, zero INTs, and zero sacks. Six rushes for 44 yards at 7.3 ypc on the ground.
Jalen Hurts: 27-38 for 304 yards at 8.0 ypa with one TD, zero INTs, and two sacks. 15 rushes for 70 yards with three TDs and a fumble on the ground.
Hurts was more explosive and picked up a few big plays throwing down the field to his nightmarish receiving corps. He was also equal to Mahomes in converting red zone trips into scores thanks to his run game prowess.
Hurts accounted for two more touchdowns than Mahomes overall, the only catch is that one of them was for the Chiefs when he fumbled away an early chance to bury Kansas City. So what do we call all that? A draw? Tie goes to the team with the superior special teams? Team with the ball last (with reasonable amounts of time to score)? Team that got the favorable call in a high leverage moment late in the game?
It’s only fair that I should issue a bit of a mea culpa for my degree of Jalen Hurts doubt given his play this season and in this game…and yet, I would say that the central takeaway from this game was that the Chiefs won this game by seeing it played on their own terms. Mahomes’ passing proved the dimension which could control the game and the Eagles’ own passing game couldn’t match.
The Chiefs gameplan
It felt at times as though the Chiefs were getting run out of the building. Especially before the half when the Hurts fumble and scoop’n’score was a key reason the Chiefs were still in the game.
Here was the final line though in the run game:
Chiefs: 26 carries for 158 yards at 6.1 ypc with one TD
Eagles: 32 carries for 115 yards at 3.6 ypc with three TDs
The Chiefs’ gameplan was the right one. They got right what San Francisco got dramatically wrong. Their goal? Stop the Philly zone run game and make Jalen Hurts beat them.
San Francisco played to stop the pass, and while they didn’t get lit up by Jalen Hurts hitting nearly every single one of his early passes, they also didn’t have any luck stopping the Eagle run game and denying Philly their best chance to control the game.
At halftime this looked like a bad idea. Hurts was 17-22 for 183 yards at 8.3 ypa with a passing touchdown and two rushing scores thanks to 11-63 on the ground.
In the second half, the Chiefs moved the ball with more precision and the Eagles had to turn to other pages of their playbook. Hurts in the second half was 10-16 for 121 yards at 7.6 ypa with zero touchdown passes and a pair of sacks. Not terrible, but not good enough to win the game when the Eagle run game was getting swarmed.
You could see live how things were starting to break down for the Eagle passing game as the Chiefs worked out their preferred route patterns and started arriving with the ball and popping guys at the catch point and Hurts had to scramble and throwaway more plays.
Nothing shocking.
The people who will tell you that Hurts is a solid but limited passer are routinely blasted on social media as being racist or something but the proof is in the pudding. When teams on the biggest stage beat you by trying to make the quarterback win games throwing the ball, it tells you the truth.
So how did the Chiefs stop the run?
Well, Chris Jones was a big factor. Their main strategy was to play him away from the running back and scrape exchange the read-side.
Here’s why that worked pretty consistently.
They’d play a safety down over a tight end in 11 personnel and if Philly used two tight ends they’d play linebacker Leo Chenal instead of a nickel and park him over one of them. With a safety down there was always man coverage on any RPO targets for Hurts, eliminating those easy throws.
The KC nose tackles couldn’t really handle these double teams from the Philly line but if they left a defensive end unblocked he’d always crash to stop the inside run, negating this advantage, and forcing a keeper by Hurts. If Philly wanted to bounce the run around the other side they’d need to win a 1-on-1 against Jones lined up as a 3-technique and that wasn’t happening. So Hurts would get a keep read but the linebacker would be sitting on the keeper and the safety over the tight end would help by forcing the ball inside against the block or by denying the easy pass to the tight end.
This seems pretty simple but the key was outnumbering the run, surviving when Philly took their shots on man coverage to AJ Brown or DeVonta Smith, and not allowing outside runs against Jones as the 3-tech to run them over.
I will note that if you tried this on Lamar Jackson, it’d be tough because your linebacker has to be able to beat him to the edge and not let him just run by you. But Hurts is more of a power runner and didn’t have the foot speed to win the edge on Willie Gay (in this instance). Also, Jackson has also come up short in the playoffs when teams position speedy linebackers to scrape and take him.
If the Eagles didn’t use a read and had the tight end block someone instead they again had to deal with being outnumbered at the line of scrimmage and the fact Jones was always getting a 1-on-1 which tended to reduce running room.
As I repeatedly note, it’s hard to count on the run game at the highest levels of football. Teams can triangulate the ball more easily when it always has to leave the backfield by being personally carried by a quarterback or running back and the best defenses can create matchups and make life hard for you.
All this did leave KC vulnerable to both the QB RPO game and the passing game. On quarterback runs, the Chiefs could run out of defenders in the box because everyone had to cover a back or tight end or receiver and it didn’t leave enough defenders to fit every gap against a Hurts inside run. On dropback passes, they had to stop Brown and Smith.
Hurts just couldn’t do enough.
The halftime show
Get ready to get off my lawn for a moment.
I hate Super Bowl halftime shows.
The Super Bowl is a nation-wide cultural event for America, if you have a family it’s fun to watch with your kids, so the insistence on sexualized half-time entertainment is an annual annoyance.
Call me a prude if you like, I don’t care, but seeing a 34-year old new mother touch herself repeatedly on camera for millions of onlookers isn’t my idea of some sort of interesting, brave, or artistic endeavor. It was lame to us millennials when aging boomer rock stars would refuse to age with dignity and instead try to hang on as provocative sexual icons and it’s going to be lame when us millennials do it as well.
She was also clearly lip syncing, a choice obviously made to maximize her ability to do choreography while suspended above the air on a platform. I get it, but as a musician myself it’s always annoying to see people online praise a musical performance that’s not. These artists are clearly right to lip sync their songs in these events because many people would apparently rather hear a fake, produced song over something imperfect but real. I will say, her choreography hardly seemed to be worth the trade in authentic musicianship.
The best halftime show I’ve ever seen, hands down without any competition, was the U2 show in the 2002 Super Bowl. It was essentially the exact opposite of this Rihanna bit.
Rather than ripping through their own multi-decade catalogue with quick song changes designed to give you a dopamine hit of “oh yeah! I member this one!” while playing tracks through the speakers, they did the opposite. They sang a new hit (Beautiful Day), front to back, hit a deep track (MLK) the vast majority of the audience had probably never heard before in a poignant memorial of the fallen from September 11, then transitioned into an old classic (Where the streets have no name) which they performed front to back with the full dynamics of an actual complete song.
No lip syncs, nothing. Yes you could hear some cracks in old Bono’s voice, yes you could see the Edge straining for a moment and pushing his earpiece in tight to make sure he hit the right harmony. They weren’t afraid of making mistakes and they didn’t try to tailor it all to some lowest common denominator formula.
People seemed to love it so maybe I’m the one who’s wrong in terms of “how do we create popular entertainment which appeals to as many people as possible.”
On the other hand, how about that Chris Stapleton national anthem?
Wish we could build the whole halftime performance out of that.
In another note, Ethan Strauss had a familiar take on the Super Bowl and football’s violence and play in American culture.
We’ll talk more about football’s place in the American cultural landscape this offseason.
Rollin with Mahomes
So overall, the Chiefs gameplanned the Eagles to maximize Hurts’ impact on the game and minimize the impact of the Philly O-line and inside running game. Good deal, but it was still a close thing.
One considerable problem KC had was the Philly quarterback sneak game. I’m not sure if the Eagles’ “line up and have guys push Hurts from behind until he’s across the line” sneak play failed a single time in this game.
It only failed them down the stretch when they DIDN’T use it.
I really don’t know what they were trying to do here, actually seems like it might have been a busted play. I do know this, you may be on your own side of the field but why not just QB sneak it twice and maintain possession? Philly fan and likeminded football mind Ben Solak noted before the game the proof would be in the pudding when we saw whether Nick Sirianni would be willing to go for it on 4th and 2 on his own side of the field. Nope.
Instead they seemed to be trying to dial up a shot which was thwarted by a blitz the Eagles didn’t block properly. Instead of going for it on 4th and 2 from deep in their own territory, they choose to punt and the Chiefs return it even deeper than they would have gotten the ball had the Eagles tried to sneak and failed.
Just not a bold choice by the Eagles to try and win the game in those crucial moments with their passing game and defense against Mahomes. When the game is on the line you want your best players in position to control the outcome, or your opponents’ worst players. The Eagles accomplished neither. They abdicated control of their fates and hoped for the best.
Perhaps they get another chance if not for the holding penalty, but on that I will note the following. I had the same reaction as everyone else, it felt like a weak call and it made for an anticlimactic ending which guaranteed Hurts wouldn’t get a full chance to make an attempt at a final drive. We’d all rather have seen that drive.
Yet, when everyone was screen capping the penalty and going “THIS decides the game???” I noticed the angle wasn’t great.
That looks like a garbage call that cost us an exciting ending to a great game. However, you can’t see the right hand of defender James Bradberry particularly well.
You can still think it’s a weak call which had an unfortunately big impact on the game, I’m not going to die on this hill, but when you grab a receiver’s jersey while he’s making his route break you’re taking a big chance. Bradberry said as much after the game, to his credit. I give credit to the Eagles overall for not whining about the call and taking the loss as men.
Meanwhile, in terms of “let’s win by having either our best players or their worst players control the game,” the Eagles failed down the stretch. They were repeatedly caught playing man coverage on high leverage downs and were defeated by man-beating concepts, such as this goal line RPO:
The play is split zone but outside Kadarius Toney feigns running a sweep across the formation (as teams often do on split zone to move the linebackers at the last minute) and the cornerback Darius Slay starts to chase him in man coverage so everyone else can stay in position. Except, oops, he’s not running a sweep after all. He reverses and hangs back.
Mahomes reads the cornerback, if he chases in man coverage then he knows he can flip the pass out quickly for a chance at a wide open touchdown. Sure enough. Had the Eagles stayed in sound position, he could have handed off instead. I bet the Eagles would rather that have happened.
For all of Hurts’ big stats, the Eagles were struggling to contain Mahomes in high leverage moments and got popped by the Chiefs run game in other moments. On the day Kansas City averaged 6.4 ypp to 5.8 for Philly and they made the plays that made the difference in the end.
Two Super Bowls now for Mahomes and the Chiefs have some cap flexibility moving forward. The Eagles have a brutal decision looming on whether to invest big money in Hurts or not as he approaches the end of his rookie contract.
As Matt Damon said during a cringey crypto commercial a year ago on behalf of some sort of pump and dump scheme perpetrated against American people…fortune favors the bold.
Lots of things lost Philly this game, particularly some of the late game play calling on offense (that 3rd and 2 drop back play with only 3 receivers going out and no rollout or bootleg for Hurts to use his legs was awful). But the biggest thing, to me, is Philly’s D Line just got absolutely bullied in the run game; you can’t give up 6 yards a carry while also failing to cover up Travis Kelce underneath with the most talented QB of all time working the possession game and expect anything else. They never had to worry about Philly’s pass rush in the second half because their offense stayed on schedule.
What a difference the O-line made for Chiefs this time compared to when they played the Bucs. Chiefs fans have been complaining some about the o-line play, but what we saw last night was leagues better than it was a couple years ago.