Kansas City Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes facing familiar doubts as quest for Super Bowl history resumes

The Kansas City Chiefs have been here before. The NFL has been here before. The outside doubts, the lacklustre performances, the fine-margin wins, the feeling their good fortune may be on the brink of expiration.

And with it all that same aura of inevitability that comes with football’s New England Patriots-esque – but slightly more loveable – villain. It is all a little too familiar. And for their rivals, a little too unnerving.

They stumbled through the 2023 campaign on offense as a shadow of their former devastating self while relying on Steve Spagnuolo’s defensive shape-shifting to carry them through, only to neutralise their favoured counterparts and break the hearts of the San Francisco 49ers once again while snatching a second successive Super Bowl.

Now here they are once more, showered with scrutiny and credential-questioning grimaces having lived off one-score wins and seen Patrick Mahomes post his worst season statistically as pilot to a so-so offense, only to have clinched the No 1 seed and a pivotal bye week with a 15-2 record.

Their pursuit of a historic third straight Super Bowl remains alive, and resumes this weekend when they host the Houston Texans for a chance to compete in a seventh consecutive AFC Championship Game.

Three-peat talk has hovered over them all year, even if Andy Reid has sought to play it down.

“You don’t ever go there,” Reid told the media. “You’re tunnelled in.

“You’re trying to find another play that works. It’s a weird dynamic. “You’re just ingrained in trying to communicate with players and trying to teach.”

Last season’s Lombardi triumph had been deemed their most impressive and most unlikely yet, such had been their struggles. But another this year would eclipse the lot having ricocheted through near misses, late escapes and marquee injuries to remain dominant without ever really letting us know if they are good or not.

The Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens by the over-stretched toe of Isaiah Likely on the opening day of the season, they did not take their first lead against the Los Angeles Chargers until the final six minutes of the game in Week Four, they survived overtime against Baker Mayfield and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and blocked a last-second field goal to deny the Denver Broncos while starting the year 9-0.

Only then were they dealt a taste of their own medicine when Josh Allen’s heroic 26-yard touchdown burst on fourth-and-two ruled out another late Buffalo Bills loss to their famous AFC foes in November. That rematch may be still to come depending on how this weekend pans out.

But the Carolina Panthers would bear the brunt of the footballing gods the following week when Kansas City’s own footballing god – albeit less god-like this season – conjured a 33-yard quarterback scramble at 27-27 to tee up Kansas City’s walk-off field goal. If there were to be any rooting for Bryce Young and his NFL revival, the Chiefs and Mahomes wanted no part of it.

Come Black Friday and they were beneficiaries of more drama at the death when a botched snap between Jackson Powers-Johnson and quarterback Aidan O’Connell gifted Nick Bolton a game-icing recovery after the Las Vegas Raiders had reached the 38-yard line trailing by just two points with 14 seconds remaining. By now the noise around Chiefs voodoo had never been louder. For real, it might exist.

Of their 15 wins this season, 11 came by one score as the Chiefs finished with a 59-point differential, ranking 11th in the league.

“It’s not easy to go through every week because you’re public enemy number one, and you’re getting a team’s best,” said offensive coordinator Matt Nagy. “So there’s that mindset of that mental callous, of being prepared every single week to know that you’re going to get the best.”

Of course, a back-to-back defending champion with the league’s (still) best quarterback, one of the NFL’s greatest offensive minds and a defensive coordinator boasting the number of every other quarterback in the league is good. But how good? We are about to find out how good.

The Chiefs offense finished the regular season ranked 17th in total yards, 14th in passing, 22nd in rushing, 15th in scoring and ninth in EPA/play, Patrick Mahomes throwing for a career-low 3,928 passing yards as a starter and 26 touchdowns to 11 interceptions.

Reid’s side lost star wide receiver Rashee Rice to a season-ending injury at a time when he had drawn the second-highest target share in the NFL, as well as spending multiple weeks without starting running back Isiah Pacheco, who would later return down the stretch.

With injury to Rice came heightened pressure on the role of rookie Xavier Worthy as the Chiefs sought to expand a route tree that had initially tailored to his straight line speed, not to mention on a 34-year-old Travis Kelce who would again find himself playing a central role on offense on the way to leading the team with 97 catches for a career-low 823 yards.

Veteran back Kareem Hunt re-signed at Arrowhead to replace Pacheco behind three Pro Bowl interior offensive linemen in Joe Thuney, Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith, while the Chiefs went out and traded for three-time First-Team All-Pro receiver DeAndre Hopkins to bolster Mahomes’ aerial options down the stretch.

They have encountered consistent pass protection issues at either offensive tackle position, they have salvaged wins with a make-shift skill-position group, Mahomes has been guilty of poor decision-making and they rank tied-22nd in the red zone, all while leaning on Spagnuolo’s fourth-ranked scoring defense.

“This team shows a lot of resiliency,” said Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones. “This team can win in a multitude of ways, whether it’s offense, defense or special teams. We’ve broadcast that throughout the year. This team had a lot of close games, we’ve had a lot of injuries, faced a lot of adversity early on throughout the year.”

What had once been a brimming Pandora’s Box of offensive sauce and sorcery has rebranded into an unsexy but stubborn winning machine built on elite clock and possession control alongside a wildly efficient defense with the flexibility to cater to the different needs of each opponent on a week-to-week basis.

For all of their limitations this season, there remained an overriding feeling there were more gears into which they could kick once the playoffs arrived; nobody knows how to navigate postseason football quite like them.

Mahomes can still torch the league’s best pass rushes into irrelevance as a generational outer-pocket creator, and can still shatter the dreams of worthy challengers in the fourth quarter of a game like no other quarterback in the NFL.

Kelce still has that proclivity for buying separation despite every player on the field knowing the ball is heading in his direction. Hopkins still has some of the safest suction hands in football, Pacheco still runs the football like his life is on the line, and suddenly Worthy has become one of the most intriguing components in the playoffs as the potential downfield haymaker Reid could look to tee up through ground control.

Nobody quite knows what version of the Chiefs team arrives this weekend. But warning signs of improvement arrived down the stretch of the regular season, including from Mahomes as he enters the game riding the longest interception-less run of his career after 237 straight pass attempts since throwing his last pick having thrown at least one interception in his first seven games of the season.

He finished the campaign strongly, posting a season-high 127.1 passer rating in Week 17’s win over the Pittsburgh Steelers having also thrown for 260 yards and a touchdown while rushing for a score to lead the Chiefs to a 27-19 win over the Texans in Week 16.

The three-time Super Bowl MVP is 15-3 in the playoffs having thrown for 5,659 yards, 46 touchdowns and just eight interceptions with a passer rating of 105.8. Within that he is 6-0 in the Divisional Round with 1,813 passing yards to 16 total touchdowns, zero interceptions and a passer rating of 115.8. Victory would see him tie the great Joe Montana for second all-time in playoff victories by a quarterback with 16, behind only Tom Brady’s 35.

He, Reid, Kelce, Chris Jones, Spagnuolo – they found the postseason formula.

Time to see if the Texans can crack the code, having just intercepted Justin Herbert four times and sacked him on four other occasions to dismantle the Chargers on Wild Card weekend as a top three-ranked unit in sacks and takeaways this season (including in the playoffs). DeMeco Ryans’ team have also allowed a league-best completion percentage of just 58, while Danielle Hunter and Will Anderson Jr are both top five in QB pressure percentage.

Houston themselves, though, have endured offensive issues of their own, ranking bottom half in yards, passing, rushing and scoring while ranking 26th in red zone and having allowed a tied-third most 54 sacks. Can’t beat the Spags defense? Then you can’t beat the Chiefs.

“I think every year is special,” said Mahomes. “Obviously you want to win three in a row and build those memories with the guys and the community. But every single year is special. And when I look back at all the different Super Bowls that we’ve won, I look back at special moments that we’ve had and special games that we’ve had. And so, we’ll try to do the same this year.”

So here we are again. A defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs team that divides opinion, the league’s best quarterback facing queries over whether he is still the best, a ‘he’s too old’ Kelce and a title defence questioned every week this season. Deja vu.

“Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men throw, catch, run and hunt a ball for four quarters spanning roughly three hours, and at the end – Patrick Mahomes always wins. Or something like that,” I wrote last February, in the immediate aftermath of Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory.

Would you bet against a similar story this year?

Watch the Houston Texans against the Kansas City Chiefs in the Divisional Round of the playoffs live on Sky Sports NFL on Saturday, with kick-off at 9.30pm.