For 52 minutes of football on Sunday night, the San Francisco 49ers were the superior team. Their defense? Swarming. Their ground game kept the Kansas City Chiefs defense on their heels. And the 49ers led halfway through the final quarter by 10 points, doubling up the Kansas City Chiefs by a score of 20-10.
And then? Then comes the lesson that Miami Dolphins fans already know all too well. Elite quarterbacks bend the game to their will. That’s exactly what we saw Patrick Mahomes do last night. By Mahomes’ standards, last night wasn’t a good performance. But when his Chiefs took over with 8 minutes and change left in the 4th quarter inside their own 20 yard line and promptly marched on a 10-play, 83 yard touchdown drive in under three minutes, the game was officially on.
The Chiefs would need seven plays and less than two and a half minutes to go 65 yards on their next possession to take the lead. And then it was all over.
If you don’t have an elite quarterback in the NFL, your margin for error is so small to win a championship. Some would argue it’s too small to look the other way on — but yet the Dolphins seemed content during the Ryan Tannehill years to do exactly that.
And there lies the lesson for the Dolphins. The rules of this league are pretty well established. You’ve either got a quarterback or you don’t. And the teams that have quarterbacks win a lot more championships in the NFL. So don’t get cute. Find your guy and go get him, even if there’s risk involved. That’s what the Kansas City Chiefs did, after all. They traded up to the 10th overall selection to draft Mahomes back in 2017.
Three years later, the rest is history. It was a Lombardy Trophy winning decision. The closest the Dolphins have come to a Lombardi in the last 30 years is hosting the Super Bowl — so let’s see this team make a bold, aggressive play to try to get themselves a quarterback.
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