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Kansas City Chiefs OC Eric Bieneimy assured reporters following Week 3, when Eric Fisher and Anthony Sherman caught touchdown passes, that the team still had an entire arsenal of unique plays available. Well, he wasn’t lying.
In Week 9 against the Carolina Panthers, the Chiefs took the Ferrari out of the garage and debuted a brand-new play. The play featured a unique pre-snap jet motion and counter from Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes. The result, of course, was the first Kansas City touchdown of the game, thrown to WR Demarcus Robinson in the back of the endzone.
The play was appropriately named too.
“It’s called ‘Ferrari Right’,” Mahomes told reporters following the game.
Showtime to Honey Thunder for our first touchdown of the game 🙌#CARvsKC on FOX pic.twitter.com/KPtNkCjo50
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) November 8, 2020
When the play happened, many took to Twitter to praise Chiefs HC Andy Reid, who is known as a guru when it comes to unique play design. As it turns out, Reid wasn’t the mastermind behind this play, he was simply the one who made the decision to actually install it.
“Yeah, so the last three weeks Pat’s been messing around with it, so I told him, I said, ‘We’re going to put it in,’ and he looked at me like I was crazy,” Reid explained. “But he had been doing it and it looked good, so, I said, ‘If it looks good, let’s try it,’ and so we tried it. He goes down there during special teams and he was messing around with a couple of things, so we put it in, and it worked.”
It started off as just a way for Mahomes to get his legs warmed up ahead of practice, but after some development, it ended up becoming a touchdown scoring play for the team.
“Yeah, so you see me in training camp and before practice, taking snaps with centers, and so obviously, I’m doing formations and stuff like that and I started going in motion,” Mahomes explained. “After that, I had to go to Tom Melvin our tight ends coach and ask if it was legal for me to be in motion and he said as long as everyone was set. Then after I got that, I took it to special teams and started working with Trav (Travis Kelce) and Tyreek (Hill) on these different plays we could run from it and I had to start throwing little hints to Coach (Andy) Reid that we needed to try it out and finally got it in and it worked out well.”
A lot of research and practice went into this becoming a successful play for Mahomes and the Chiefs. But not everyone anticipated that this play would work out as well as it did.
“You know what, the crazy thing is, I really didn’t think that play was going to be put in,” Chiefs WR Tyreek Hill told reporters after the game. “But it’s Patrick Mahomes, so. There was one day at practice where he was like, ’10, 10, 10, come over here I’ve got a play for you!’ And I saw him do his counter jet (motion) and I was like, ‘Bro, what are you doing? Why don’t you just line up and snap the ball?’ But it turned out to be a great play.”
While Hill was shocked to see the play installed, he wasn’t exactly surprised that the play came from Mahomes. In addition to growing as a quarterback these last three years, Hill has seen Mahomes’ creativity grow under the tutelage of Reid and Bieniemy.
“His creativity — just him being around Coach Reid,” Hill continued. “Coach Reid is wearing off on Pat, just the creativity and the ideas that both of them have. It’s just collaborating and EB (Eric Bieniemy) too, EB’s right there in the mix too, so it’s just crazy.”
And for all the fans worried about the team debuting yet another unique play in a midseason non-conference game, don’t worry. Hill expects more creativity on the way from his QB and coaching staff.
“I know we’re going to have something fun after the bye week.”
If history is any indicator, the team still has plenty of unique play calls available and more soon-to-be installed in the playbook. Perhaps we’ll even get another variation of this play using the pre-snap motion from Mahomes.