The Kansas City Chiefs have beaten the Denver Broncos in five straight appearances since QB Patrick Mahomes entered the league. He got his first start against the Broncos in Week 17 of the 2017 season. It wasn’t Mahomes’ most flashy game, but it gave Broncos players like star LB Von Miller a taste of what was to come.
The next time the Broncos would face Mahomes, as the starting QB of the Chiefs in October of 2018, they’d have him exactly where they wanted him. It was 23-20, the clock was ticking down with just over three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, and it was third-and-5. Miller would pin his ears back and do what he does best. Miller pressures Mahomes, who escapes to his left. He’s running out of real estate heading toward the sideline, but then Mahomes switches the football to his left hand and tosses it to Tyreek Hill. That play kept the drive alive and set up the game-winning touchdown.
That’s just one of the hair-pulling examples of what it’s like to be a defender and face Mahomes. You think you have him beat — but you just don’t. Miller was recently asked about how he can stop Mahomes, and his answer was a brutally honest realization.
“Can’t. We’ve just got to score points,” Miller told Washington Post reporter Kent Babb in a recent interview. “If we’re able to get off the field — you can hold them to a third-down here and there, but that’s on our offense. We’ve got to score on offense because you cannot — it’s not smart to go into the game and say we’re going to hold Patrick Mahomes to no points.”
It appears that Miller has come to the realization that the rest of the AFC West came to around the time of the 2020 NFL Draft. It was one that sparked an offensive arms race in the division. That realization, of course, is that you can’t stop Patrick Mahomes on the defensive side of the ball.
We saw it all throughout the 2019 postseason, It’s only a matter of time before Mahomes and the Chiefs’ offense gets hot and scores their points. You can delay the inevitable, get off to a good start, and hold Mahomes to an occasional third-down. But the only way to stop Mahomes and the Kansas City offense is by scoring more points than them.
It has to hurt for an elite defender to admit that he can’t stop an elite offensive player, but it might hurt just as much to keep up the facade. It also puts a lot of pressure on the young offense in Denver to deliver during the 2020 NFL season.
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