Tag: Travis Kelce

MIAMI — The 2019 San Francisco 49ers defense dealt with a late-season wobble due to injuries to key players Dee Ford, Kwon Alexander, and Jaquiski Tartt and has come back recently to retain its status as one of the best defenses in the NFL. Only the Patriots had a better Defensive DVOA (Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted efficiency metric) than the 49ers, and neither the Vikings nor the Packers had much of an answer for them in the playoffs.

It’s a significant strength coming into Super Bowl LIV. The problem is, San Francisco’s significant strength is about to run into the Chiefs’ overwhelming strength, which is their offense when Patrick Mahomes is healthy. The reigning NFL MVP worked through knee and hand injuries this season, but recent games have shown a relatively clean bill of health for Mahomes the thrower and Mahomes the runner, and that’s a rather glaring problem for 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh and his crew, no matter how good they have been.

The respect San Francisco holds for Mahomes is evident and well-deserved.

“One, his mobility is unique,” Saleh recently said when asked to analyze what makes Mahomes so formidable. “His arm strength is ridiculous. He’s very, very accurate. But, what I don’t think people give him enough credit for is that he actually plays quarterback. There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of quarterbacks in this league that will say no to number one [the first progression] and then it just becomes street ball. He gets rid of the ball on time. He puts it where it needs to be. He hits a lot of throws in rhythm. And when he needs to take his shot, he knows how to buy time in the pocket and do it. So, he’s a superstar in every way you can possibly imagine and he’s going to be tough to deal with.”

And then, there’s the matter of Mahomes’ receivers — Tyreek Hill, Sammy Watkins, Mecole Hardman, and tight end Travis Kelce. In a word, yikes.

“They’re, at every position, it almost looks like they got their roster from the Olympic relay team and threw them all on the football field,” Saleh said. “Not to say they can’t run routes and catch either, because they can do that. They’re a special group and you can see why they’re there.”

Understanding the challenge is one thing. Dealing with it is another. The combination of Mahomes’ acumen and the ridiculous speed and synchronization of his receivers make Mahomes the most terrifying deep thrower in the NFL. Through the 2019 regular season and postseason, per Pro Football Focus, Mahomes has attempted just 69 passes of 20 or more air yards (Aaron Rodgers has led the league with 101), but he’s completed 36 of them for 1,275 yards, a league-leading 15 touchdowns, just two interceptions, and a league-leading passer rating of 125.2.

This is not great news for San Francisco’s pass defense, which fared pretty well on Richard Sherman’s left side in DVOA against deep passes, ranking seventh in the league, but was average elsewhere. This defense ranked 21st against deep passes over the middle, and 15th to the right. Dealing with Mahomes’ deep ball and his deep receivers is a challenge every defense eventually faces, and now, it’s San Francisco’s turn.

But wait… there’s more. Much more. Basically, Patrick Mahomes is a modern-day defensive nightmare.

Playing against Mahomes is a bit like hanging on to a tiger by the tail — it’s dangerous when you engage, and fatal when you let go. The Texans found that out in the wild-card round of the playoffs when they put up a 24-0 lead on the Chiefs, only to watch Mahomes and that offense score touchdowns on seven straight drives on the way to a 51-31 win. Mahomes threw five touchdown passes in that game, tight end Travis Kelce caught three of them, and Houston’s no-matter-what strategy of playing man coverage was exposed as a fool’s errand.

Not that the 49ers play a lot of man defense; in the 2019 season, they did so on just 61 targets, allowing 47 completions for 638 yards, seven touchdowns, and two interceptions. San Francisco plays mostly iterations of zone defense led by pressure from a voluminous front four, speed linebackers Kwon Alexander and Fred Warner, and a great secondary when everyone’s healthy and the right people are in.

But against Cover-3 and Cover-4, San Francisco’s two primary coverages this season, Per Sports Info Solutions, Mahomes has completed 33 of 47 passes of 15 air yards or more for 1,036 yards, 795 air yards, 10 touchdowns, one interception, and a quarterback rating of 143.4. The 49ers defended 379 catchable targets in the regular season; 196 were in either Cover-3 (114) or Cover-4 (82). And when defending passing attempts of 15 or more air yards this season in those two coverages, the 49ers allowed 21 completions on 37 attempts for 492 yards, four touchdowns, and two interceptions. The deep ball could be a problem for Richard Sherman and his friends.

This is not a strength-against-strength battle for the 49ers, though replacing cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon with Emmanuel Moseley has really worked well in the playoffs. In two postseason games, Moseley has allowed six catches on 11 targets for 58 yards, 29 yards after the catch, no touchdowns, one interception, and an opponent passer rating of 31.6. Last time Mahomes faced a secondary this statistically formidable, it was last December 8 against New England, when he completed 26 of 40 passes for 283 yards, one touchdown, and one interception in a 23-16 win for the Chiefs. The Patriots play man coverage at the league’s highest rate, but they also have the best overall secondary from a talent-to-scheme perspective.

Bottom line, there isn’t a schematic edge to be gained when you’re facing Mahomes. You must play sound coverage at every level, and you must know who to double when. Sometimes it means doubling tight end Travis Kelce; other times, it could mean throwing a bracket at Tyreek Hill on a vertical route. But you have to have answers for those two, as well as receivers Sammy Watkins and Mecole Hardman. In 2019, Kansas City put three receivers and a tight end on the field on 359 of Mahomes’ dropbacks — he attempted 332 passes, completing 220 for 2,896 yards, 1,421 air yards, 21 touchdowns, and four interceptions.

Okay, you say — just get some heat on him with that great 49ers front four, and it’s all good. Well, not so much. In the 2019 regular season and postseason, including the games he played in which he had lower-body injuries and really couldn’t break the pocket as he’d like to, Mahomes completed 71 of 145 passes for 1,057 yards, a league-leading 12 touchdowns, and just two interceptions. And if you’re thinking of blitzing him — well, don’t. That takes a defender out of coverage, and that’s when Mahomes really gets going. Against the blitz this season, he’s completed 62 of 92 passes for 805 yards, seven touchdowns, and no interceptions.

Here in Week 14, New England gets pressure up the middle, but it doesn’t matter. Mahomes just side-steps it, waits for Hardman to scald the one-on-one coverage, and does his thing downfield. It’s an underthrow, but as Hardman is in the next county by the time the ball comes down, that doesn’t really matter.

So, how to stop Mahomes, or at least slow him down? Sending as many defenders into coverage as possible is one way to go.

The Lions, for all their failures in the 2019 season, did a pretty decent job of limiting explosive plays from the Chiefs in a 34-30 Week 4 loss — and they did it without cornerback Darius Slay, who missed the game with a hamstring injury, and safety Quandre Diggs, who suffered his own hamstring injury in the first half. Mahomes completed 24 of 42 passes for 315 yards, but he also didn’t throw a touchdown pass for the first time in a 14-game stretch, one short of the NFL record set by Peyton Manning. In that game, the Lions endeavored to double both Watkins and Kelce. They totaled 71 snaps in the slot from their cornerbacks, linebackers, and safeties. Detroit’s defenders had the athleticism to delay Mahomes’ reads, bump and constrict receiver freedom through the routes, and clamp down when the ball came down in potential big-play situations.

The problem with using the Detroit game as a model for the Super Bowl is that Tyreek Hill was also out of that game with a broken clavicle he suffered in Week 1 against the Jaguars. When Hill’s in there, taking one of your safeties and maybe your slot cornerback downtown on every play, it adds some complexity to the recipe.

That said, Detroit did present a favorable paradigm by playing a lot of aggressive coverage looks at the line, and added some pattern-reading principles to best follow Mahomes’ targets through their routes. The Lions also got to their coverage spots with a delay at times, perhaps to limit the amount of time Mahomes had to diagnose who was covering who. Of course, with all those rushing lanes opened through coverage, Mahomes was able to run, which he did for what was then a career high of 54 yards.

And if the 49ers want to run a ton of nickel against this offense, they should go with the feeling. Fred Warner and Kwon Alexander are quality coverage linebackers, and in K’Waun Williams, San Francisco has a great slot defender. From the slot this season, Williams has allowed 48 catches on 66 targets for 375 yards, no touchdowns, two interceptions, and an opponent passer rating of 73.7.

Watch the way he reads Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph in Week 3 as Rudolph breaks the pocket and tries to hit receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster on a mobile option route. The result? An interception.

The ability to spy the quarterback as he extends the play and jump the throw in time could be a somewhat valuable asset against Mahomes.

Different kinds of pattern-matching and pattern-reading have been as close to Kryptonite as anything in Mahomes’ NFL career. The Broncos confounded him in 2018 with different match blitzes that proved effective. But Mahomes sees the field more effectively now, and he’s better at taking apart coverages, especially disguised coverages. There’s also a legitimate question about the 49ers’ ability to deal with the Chiefs’ receiver speed in anything approaching man or match coverage.

In the AFC Championship game, the Titans tried a different approach with three-man rushes, putting eight in coverage at times, only to see Mahomes run eight times for 53 yards and one amazing touchdown.

Mahomes also completed 23 of 35 passes for 294 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions. With that, another conclusion becomes clear: Blitz Mahomes, and he’ll kill you. Drop eight, and he’ll kill you. Fun!

“When you have all these weapons, and you only bring a three-man rush, it gives me room to run it,” Mahomes said after the game. “I love being here with this team, and all these guys make things a lot easier.”

Finding ways to stop Patrick Mahomes at this point in the season is like being asked to build a perfect weapon with a bunch of stuff from the junk drawer in your kitchen. No matter how good your defense is, the options are limited. If Saleh can pull off a MacGyver and actually create the perfect beast in Super Bowl LIV, he’ll have done more than most defensive coordinators have managed — and he’ll most likely be rewarded with a Lombardi Trophy.

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.”