The Chiefs are good enough to give Andy Reid the Super Bowl he deserves

[Direckshun]

My body is willing.

https://www.sbnation.com/2017/9/18/1...bowl-contender

The Chiefs are good enough to give Andy Reid the Super Bowl he deserves
Andy Reid and the Chiefs look like the best team in the NFL right now, and I’m so here for it.
by Louis Bien @louisbien
Sep 18, 2017, 11:01am EDT

There are seven NFL teams sitting at 2-0, and none of them has looked as good as the Kansas City Chiefs. This is weird.

Not that the Chiefs being good is weird. The Chiefs have had a winning record each season and missed the playoffs just once in four years under Andy Reid.

But for the Chiefs to look utterly dominant is something else. Under Reid, the Chiefs have become the sort of high-floor, low-ceiling team that you wouldn’t really expect to see in the Super Bowl. They’ve gone down swinging (read: painfully, excruciatingly) in all three of their playoff losses under Reid and have yet to get past the Divisional round. They could be counted on to be pretty good in all phases — to rush better than most teams, to be frustrating to score on, and to not cough up the ball — but fall short when games are tight and matter most.

In two games against two good opponents this season — the Eagles finished last season fifth in DVOA, the Patriots were first and, like, won a Super Bowl — the Chiefs have scored 69 points and given up 47, rushed for 331 yards, passed for 519, and generally look like an enhanced version of the team we’ve come to know. A rising tide lifts all boats — or in this case, a rejuvenated Alex Smith makes the Chiefs a helluva lot harder to deal with. He has been spectacular through two games, throwing for 619 yards at 9.8 yards per attempt and a 134 passer rating.

With not even two weeks completed in the season, we have only enough data to overreact to what we see. That said, the Chiefs seem worth overreacting to. They have always been good. The idea that they may be great isn’t at all farfetched. They have been building toward this for years. On its current trajectory, this would be one of Reid’s finest teams ever — and oh, it’s bucking NFL conventions along the way, which is always good and never bad.

This is basically a college team

The axiom goes that champions are built through the NFL Draft. By my count, the Chiefs are starting 16 players who they drafted, with just one of those players — veteran linebacker Derrick Johnson — having been on the roster longer than Reid.

This team has been built in Reid’s image, particularly on offense where the Chiefs have finally stockpiled a critical mass of squat, fast-twitch, space-destroyers to hornswoggle the league.

The most shocking thing about the Chiefs’ season-opening win over the Patriots was that they did it while running what looked like a college offense. Early in the game Smith, Tyreek Hill, and Travis Kelce formed a backfield, and Kelce stepped up to take the snap and ran the option:



And it worked! So the Chiefs kept running it all night, sometimes throwing three backs and two tight ends on the field to complete their Navy impression.

A rookie — running back Kareem Hunt — was maybe the most important player on the field. He finished with 148 yards and a touchdown on 17 carries, and he looked explosive, and tough, and remarkably balanced in the process. The circumstances of general manager John Dorsey’s firing this offseason are somewhat cloudy, but he gave the cash-strapped Chiefs an incredible parting gift in the third-rounder.

Hunt and the running game opened up the downfield passing game, and Smith cleaned up, throwing for 178 yards on just three deep balls. He had two more deep passes for 79 yards against the Eagles, which is good for anyone and outstanding for a notorious dink-and-dunker. Smith looks like a brand new quarterback this season.

Alex Smith is playing with cuss

After rookie backup Pat Mahomes unleashed a series of spectacular passes in the Chiefs’ final preseason game, Smith was spotted on the sideline looking ... not enthused. The moment recalled his body language in the midst of losing his starting job to Colin Kaepernick with the 49ers.

Smith never got his starting job back in San Francisco. So far after stepping back into the Chiefs’ lineup, he has not only played well, but so unlike himself.

Smith is averaging 6.8 yards per attempt over his career, which is paltry given he’s completing 62 percent of his passes. Last season, just 8.16 percent of his passes traveled more than 20 yards through the air, according to Cian Fahey’s Pre-Snap Reads Quarterback Catalogue, fewer than every qualified quarterback except Sam Bradford and Jared Goff.

This season, Smith has attempted seven passes longer than 20 yards, roughly 11 percent of his attempts, and complete five of them. One of his best was a dime he dropped to a covered Chris Conley on the Chiefs’ final touchdown drive against the Eagles for a 35-yard gain.

Maybe it took a much younger, rocket-armed existential threat to draw out this new, aggressive Alex Smith, or maybe it’s the fact that he’s finally playing in an offense that he’s truly comfortable in ...

“One of the things we did when Alex came here was we went back and kind of looked at some of the stuff he had done in college and was familiar with,” Reid said, referring to what would become part of the base offense.

Whatever the case, the Chiefs’ offense is well-positioned to go much further than it has in years.

And yet there are two things that could bring the Chiefs to a screeching halt

he first: The Chiefs lost Eric Berry for the season to a non-contact Achilles injury in the season opener. Perhaps no defensive position is as heaped with responsibility as safety in today’s NFL, and Berry plays it as instinctually and beautifully as anyone in the league.

He was a big reason why Rob Gronkowski couldn’t get open against the Chiefs’ secondary. Should they face the Patriots again this season, Berry’s absence could be costly.

The second: This is still an Andy Reid team, and for all the good that means — his teams are as consistent and well-balanced as they come — the Chiefs will be hamstrung in late-game situations.

This is the Reid Paradox: He is somehow both the best and worst thing to happen to NFL teams. There is nothing more to do than to point at the team’s last two playoff losses. Reid is hardwired to make egregious game-management mistakes. And yet, it’s not like we ever see him panic. You get the sense that Reid is a laborious thinker who is uncomfortable being sped up. At some point this season, the Chiefs will enter the final minutes of the fourth quarter with either too many timeouts or not enough, and when they lose by one score, Reid will be the only person who isn’t miffed.

I can’t help but make this personal: I love Andy Reid

I love that his players love him, I love that he loves Hawaiian shirts, and I love how he tweaks the game. He and Bill Belichick are perhaps the only two NFL head coaches who you can count on to truly innovate a game plan rather than simply iterate on a few guiding principles. Every week, they’ll do something that no other NFL team is doing, and it’ll work. And unlike Belichick, Reid is a person. Bill Belichick has never looked this happy.

I’m a Lions fan, so every year I pick another team I want to win a Super Bowl since mine won’t. I am so here for a Chiefs title run. Innovation deserves to be rewarded. Time — not just Reid’s near-20 seasons, but Smith’s quest to be deemed worthy and Berry’s constant battle against his body — deserves to be rewarded. Fun deserves to be rewarded, and it’s been so long since that has felt like the case in the Super Bowl.

This is a team in Reid’s image. It is quirky, and disciplined and unassuming for how good it has been. This is what his tenure in Kansas City has been building up to. The roster is of the team’s own design, and now it’s up to Reid to guide it. He is the biggest reason why this might the Chiefs’ year, but he’ll be the biggest reason if it’s not.

[chiefzilla1501]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

That's my point, though - you HAVE to view it in isolation. Like I said, there's an argument to be made but you aren't (weren't) making it.

If your position is that you want to see more - okay, I get that. But when you're looking at the recent two games and trying to lump it into a trend, you're absolutely falling prey to confirmation bias.

Because had you known nothing about Alex Smith (or had Mahomes done the exact same thing), you wouldn't be making these arguments. Those performances by Smith, in isolation, do not support your argument.

You can squint and try to shoehorn them into your preconceived conclusions, but you're not giving them a fair read at that point.

Smith threw for 350+ yards and 4 TDs, including making big plays when we actually had a lead in week 1. He threw for 250 yards and went deep 4 times in a game that we were trailing for 3 minutes and never ran a risk of losing a handle on (seriously, 'Wentz was moving the ball' is the best you've got? How many games was our opponent moving the ball and we simply couldn't answer over the last 4 seasons? Several).

If you saw "the same old Alex" in those games, you're just seeing what you wanted to see. You're trying too hard to fit him into the narrative of that 4 years of football and refusing to consider the possibility that he has changed his approach. You've acknowledged it by insisting that it's not '2 games in isolation' that you're considering.

And that's not the conversation that is being had right now. Yes, Smith needs to do more to establish that this is a new normal but what we have seen for those 2 game is absolutely something different. Besides, the problem with Smith has never been the 80% of his play - by and large the bulk of his snaps have always been sufficient. It's the 3-4 plays/gm he's left on the field that could make all the difference in the world.

Right now he's trying those 3-4 plays and he's hitting them. He's making the throw that he didn't make against Pittsburgh, or he's at least attempting it (the throw he made to Hill against Philly is a perfect example of that). The throw he made to Hunt rather than his shell efforts in the playoff game against NE is another one. He's playing differently right now. Maybe it lasts, maybe it doesn't. But there's no good way to argue that this is just the same ol' Smith. His 'down' game yielded a 4,000 yard pace when the Chiefs never really had an urgent need to spread it out and throw it around. That's a different brand of quarterbacking.

What is proof he's changing his approach? I agree, he's airing it out earlier more often. But while you want to point to new england as proof of some Renaissance, it's consistent as ever that when Alex Smith gets down by a lot early he becomes an aggressive qb. Enough so that many times in his short kc career he's clawed is from 2-3 tds down to at least a one score game. The second game we saw our typical inefficiency when the middle of the game had no urgency and we got the usual conservative mistakes.

Sure he's sprinkling in a few aggressive plays here and there. But the story hasn't changed. Our offense sputters in the middle of games when they don't have urgency to score. And they sputter consistently around the same time, the same game situation, in the same way.

Again, after watching the first 2 games, does anyone think we'd play Carolina, Tampa, Houston, Pittsburgh any different than we did last year? Maybe we have a better running game and a few deep passes sprinkled in. But I'd bet we manage the shit out of those games way longer than we'd need to.

[milkman]

Originally Posted by O.city

I'm interested to see what others think about this defensive strategy they're going with. They're rushing 4 alot early, dropping guys into coverage. Then get more aggressive later.

Before I give my thesis on it, whats everyone else think.

I'd be fine with it if that was what they are actually doing.

But there's a shit ton of 3 man rushes, and I absolutely hate that.

[Danguardace]

I can picture America's Game version Chiefs Version... Shots of Andy Reid and Alex Smith at their previous clubs. Cut to them at Alex's first OTA....

[Danguardace]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

Love this guy

[Mav]

Originally Posted by Hammock Parties

Now you need to account for the difference in the league's approach to passing at the time.



4,000 yards was a big deal in 2003.



Now it's nothing.

Move those goal posts to fit that narrative. Let's not also forget the oline, tony Gonzalez and the Rbs. Also that green played for a coach whose entire offensive philosophy was to push the ball. But those are minor details. That being said, Green was a better qb but the excuse of it being a passing league is weak as hell.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Hammock Parties]

Originally Posted by Mav

Green was a better qb but the excuse of it being a passing league is weak as hell.

No it's not. Because Smith was in the league at the time. And getting his ass ****ing handed to him.

If they hadn't changed the rules guys like Alex Smith would be even lower on the totem pole in regards to starting in the NFL.

[Mav]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

Maybe it's because I just saw Mizzou play Purdue the day before or perhaps my memory of the Cassel days has just been seared in stronger than many.

But I still don't see the miserable, awful, no good very bad half of football that everyone is talking about on Sunday. No, the first half wasn't great but again, if Hill just picks up the ball a little sooner and doesn't lose his stride trying to adjust, that's an easy six on a well thrown ball and the entire narrative is different.

The defense was still trying to feel out Wentz and his weapons but not getting gashed. The offense wasn't quite in sync but it was a slipshod pile of ass or anything out there - it was just a little meandering; not quite locked in yet.

Watching that game to the half I never really felt like the Eagles were going to win it. It looked like the Chiefs were just taking a body blow or two while they were finding their footing and getting themselves ready to pull away.

That's not the Jets out there just because they both wear green. That's a damn good football team on the other side and the Chiefs were a garbage time score away from beating them by double digits.

This was my feeling as well. I felt for most of the panic mode chiefs fans who were going "oh we suck again" were really not paying attention to how well philly played and just how good they are. They are a legitimate playoff team and possible super bowl team.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Mav]

Originally Posted by Hammock Parties

No it's not. Because Smith was in the league at the time. And getting his ass ****ing handed to him.

If they hadn't changed the rules guys like Alex Smith would be even lower on the totem pole in regards to starting in the NFL.

A 20 year old kid on the worst ****ing team in recent memory and worst franchise in the league. He struggled. NO ****ING WAY!


It should shock me that after watching Geno Smiths career get destroyed by a terrible franchise in the Jets that you would have just the tiniest bit of an understanding how important the surroundings are to the development of a qb. But you still don't get it.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[SAUTO]

Originally Posted by ThaVirus

I assumed that was a miss on Alex's part during the game and, having seen that clip, still stand by it.

But it's not a big deal. You're not going to hit every play, especially on passes 40 yards downfield.

I liked the aggression.

I agree with this

[RunKC]

Originally Posted by milkman

I'd be fine with it if that was what they are actually doing.

But there's a shit ton of 3 man rushes, and I absolutely hate that.

It's perfect for the redzone. When you have bulls up front like Chris Jones, Justin Houston, Allen Bailey and Bennie Logan you can afford to do that because each of those guys commands a double team.

The windows getting much smaller in the redzone, but 8v5 makes it even more difficult.

I would prefer to rush 4 on regular downs outside of the redzone.

[jjchieffan]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

That's my point, though - you HAVE to view it in isolation. Like I said, there's an argument to be made but you aren't (weren't) making it.

If your position is that you want to see more - okay, I get that. But when you're looking at the recent two games and trying to lump it into a trend, you're absolutely falling prey to confirmation bias.

Because had you known nothing about Alex Smith (or had Mahomes done the exact same thing), you wouldn't be making these arguments. Those performances by Smith, in isolation, do not support your argument.

You can squint and try to shoehorn them into your preconceived conclusions, but you're not giving them a fair read at that point.

Smith threw for 350+ yards and 4 TDs, including making big plays when we actually had a lead in week 1. He threw for 250 yards and went deep 4 times in a game that we were trailing for 3 minutes and never ran a risk of losing a handle on (seriously, 'Wentz was moving the ball' is the best you've got? How many games was our opponent moving the ball and we simply couldn't answer over the last 4 seasons? Several).

If you saw "the same old Alex" in those games, you're just seeing what you wanted to see. You're trying too hard to fit him into the narrative of that 4 years of football and refusing to consider the possibility that he has changed his approach. You've acknowledged it by insisting that it's not '2 games in isolation' that you're considering.

And that's not the conversation that is being had right now. Yes, Smith needs to do more to establish that this is a new normal but what we have seen for those 2 game is absolutely something different. Besides, the problem with Smith has never been the 80% of his play - by and large the bulk of his snaps have always been sufficient. It's the 3-4 plays/gm he's left on the field that could make all the difference in the world.

Right now he's trying those 3-4 plays and he's hitting them. He's making the throw that he didn't make against Pittsburgh, or he's at least attempting it (the throw he made to Hill against Philly is a perfect example of that). The throw he made to Hunt rather than his shell efforts in the playoff game against NE is another one. He's playing differently right now. Maybe it lasts, maybe it doesn't. But there's no good way to argue that this is just the same ol' Smith. His 'down' game yielded a 4,000 yard pace when the Chiefs never really had an urgent need to spread it out and throw it around. That's a different brand of quarterbacking.

Well said. I'm sure tht the haters will try to dispute it. But this post is right on. Rep!

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by jjchieffan

Well said. I'm sure tht the haters will try to dispute it. But this post is right on. Rep!

it's all strategy, bro

[Sandy Vagina]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

it's all strategy, bro

[threebag]

Originally Posted by Hammock Parties

No it's not. Because Smith was in the league at the time. And getting his ass ****ing handed to him.

If they hadn't changed the rules guys like Alex Smith would be even lower on the totem pole in regards to starting in the NFL.

[OnTheWarpath15]

Why does Andy Reid DESERVE a Super Bowl?