Every coach studies opponent tendencies. The most effective coaches put their players in the best possible positions to attack those tendencies and win. In their 31-20 win over the 49ers in Super Bowl LIV, the Chiefs’ offensive coaches, led by head coach Andy Reid, offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy, and quarterbacks coach Mike Kafka, did a masterful job of creating big plays when they were most needed. This was never more evident than on the Chiefs’ two most explosive plays of the game — the 44-yard pass from Patrick Mahomes to Tyreek Hill with 7:13 left in the fourth quarter, and Mahomes’ 38-yard completion to Sammy Watkins with 3:44 remaining.
Each play was desperately needed. Kansas City was down 20-10 on the drive that contained the Hill catch, and the Chiefs ended that drive four plays later with a one-yard touchdown pass to Travis Kelce. The Hill catch came on third-and-15 from the Kansas City 35-yard line, and it pushed the ball to the San Francisco 21. Three Mahomes incompletions followed, but a 20-yard pass interference call against safety Tarvarius Moore set the ball at the one-yard line for the Kelce score. Without that Hill catch, though, the game likely has a very different result.
The Watkins catch came on second-and-7 from the San Francisco 48-yard line. It put the ball at the San Francisco 10-yard line. Mahomes then ran for six yards, was sacked on the next play, and then found running back Damien Williams for a five-yard score. That put the Chiefs up 24-20 and gave them the lead they would not relinquish.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about both plays is that they played specifically to San Francisco’s defensive tendencies, and Kansas City’s coaches and players were smart enough to dial them up even as their offense had been severely challenged to that point by Robert Saleh’s squad. Early in the game, San Francisco kept him to shorter stuff with their pass rush, which he told me after the game.
“That was just how the game turned out,” he said. “Those guys were getting upfield — obviously that’s a lot of great defensive linemen, and they were covering downfield. So, we hit some short stuff, and when I saw their safeties coming up [in the box], we tried to take some shots later on in the game.”
The 44-yard Hill play has all kinds of levels to it. As ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky explained, the Chiefs love to test defenses with a play with a three-by-one set in which Kelce and one of their speed receivers (Hill in this case) will each run inside routes, with the outside receiver (Watkins in this case) running either a go route or an in-cut based on the coverage.
This is worth your 3 minutes coming off of last nights #SuperBowlLIV and the 3rd&15 🚀🚀🚀 heard round the world. I see the play from @patrickmahomes to @cheetah for the @chiefs a little differently. @getupespn @arrowheadpride @peter_king @espngreeny pic.twitter.com/beUTBJW0YB
— Dan Orlovsky (@danorlovsky7) February 3, 2020
There’s a version of the play, also based on attacking coverage rules, in which Hill runs what looks like the inside route, and then, he’ll break out to the corner route. That was what broke San Francisco’s defense up.
“They were playing this kind of robber coverage all game long, where the safety was coming down and robbing our deep crossing routes,” Mahomes said. “We had a good play call on where [tight end Travis] Kelce did a little stutter deep cross. We had Tyreek getting one-on-one with that safety, and the biggest thing is that we needed really good protection. It was a long route. It was actually the same play we ran against New England in the playoffs last year [in the 2018 AFC Championship Game], getting him down the sideline. We had great protection, I put it out there, and Tyreek made a great play.”
Rolling it back to the Chiefs’ 2018 AFC Championship loss to the Patriots was a fascinating reveal by Mahomes, coming as it did right after the Super Bowl win. Compare Hill’s 44-yarder in the Super Bowl…
…with this 42-yard play against the Patriots. It’s the same concept, flipped to the other side of the field.
Get the defense thinking Hill’s going to run the crosser based on tape, have him blast to the corner, and there’s just no way the deep safety is going to be able to adjust to that.
Another wrinkle here — Kafka told Peter King of NBC Sports that in the first half, the Chiefs ran a version of the play that had Hill staying inside on the crosser. One example of a similar concept is this 10-yard pass to Damien Williams with 4:59 left in the second quarter. Here, both Hill and Kelce work inside, and linebacker Kwon Alexander (No. 56) bumps Hill near the line to affect his route before taking off to try and tackle Williams. Ward, meanwhile, is skating off to the deep third of coverage.
This defensive iteration might have worked more effectively than the one the 49ers had on the 44-yarder.
The Chiefs have an implicit understanding of how Hill’s speed off the line and through his routes affects coverage, and they’re brilliant at exploiting it. The 49ers had done a great job of combining pass rush and tight coverage, but this is about when the Chiefs started raining down Kryptonite all over the field.
The Watkins play was interesting more in s specific matchup and technique sense. After the game, Watkins referred to a 65-yard completion from Aaron Rodgers to Davante Adams in the NFC Championship game as fodder for how the Chiefs would challenge Sherman specifically.
“I just knew it was one-on-one from film study,” Watkins said. “On a play where he was covering Davante Adams, I saw [Sherman] coming off an inside release when he’d been playing heavy outside the whole game. I knew Pat could make the throw, and that’s why we work on those types of situations.”
And then, the dagger.
“I just thank Davante Adams because I saw him kill [Sherman] on the inside release.”
Devastating, and accurate. Here’s the Adams play. Watch how Adams (No. 17, bottom of the screen) takes an outside jab step on Sherman, gets Sherman going one way, and then takes it inside.
And now, the Watkins version. It’s the same outside-to-inside jab step, and a similar result. As great as Sherman as been throughout his career, quick angles are the best way to beat him off the line.
Another common denominator here is how the safety over Sherman (Jimmie Ward in both cases) has eyes to the strong side of the formation before coming back. That leaves Sherman with iffy help over the top. When Watkins mentioned the one-on-one, that likely means the Chiefs saw Ward’s involvement to the three-receiver side (probably working off Kelce, who went in motion and back pre-snap), and could win to that side of the field.
Perhaps the most admirable aspect of what the Chiefs put together late in Super Bowl LIV was that, when they were down 20-10 late in the fourth quarter, they didn’t coach scared. They didn’t implode. They had studied what the 49ers did — and perhaps more importantly, what they couldn’t do — and unleashed the right concepts when they were needed the most.
Coming back from double-digit deficits in each of their three postseason games? Well, that’s not great for the blood pressure, but if there’s one thing the 2019 Chiefs proved true, it’s not how you start, but how you finish. And if you want to finish with the Lombardi Trophy in your hands, you’d better get cracking on the tape.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”
