The bye week is officially over for the Kansas City Chiefs as they’re back at practice preparing for the Oakland Raiders in Week 13.
During the bye week, the Chiefs accomplished a ton of self-scouting work and began to fix some things that could help the Chiefs improve over the course of the next five games. Media members spoke with Andy Reid, Steve Spagnuolo and Eric Bieniemy about the types of things that the team spent time working on during the bye week. For Reid, he focused specifically on eliminating costly penalties.
“The thing that I mentioned Monday was just penalties,” Reid said. “Fixing those — that’s something that we can work on. There are other things but I am not going to get into those. The one that really jumps out at you is just taking care of the penalties. That’s your fundamentals and discipline and those kinds of things. There’s a point that if a guy gets an edge on you, you don’t want to… grab him. So you’ve got to discipline yourself not to do that. As easy as it is to do, whatever position it is, we’ve had those all over the place. You’ve got to discipline yourself and work your feet and again angles on things.”
Offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy echoed coach Reid on the penalty front. He wants the team to start playing the opponent and stop putting themselves in situations that are difficult to get out of.
“One thing we’ve got to do, we’ve got to stop the self-inflicted wounds,” Bieniemy said. “We’ve been killing ourselves with penalties. We’re doing a good job of executing, but we’ll go down have a good drive and we’ll stop ourselves. Then we put ourselves in a situation where it’s tough to overcome… at the end of the day we’ve got to play against the opponent and stop playing against ourselves. Let’s clean up the little things, let’s be fundamentally sound, let’s focus and then we’ll give ourselves a better opportunity to go out and be who we know we can be.”
Penalties have really got the Chiefs off schedule, especially on the offensive side of the ball this season. You look back to Week 11 against the Chargers and they had penalties of two of their first three offensive possessions, which ultimately cost the team points. So really Reid and Bieniemy have taken the time to look back and self-scout how these things are happening. They can ask himself things like, “Are we calling the right plays and are we executing well enough?”
As for the defensive side of the ball, defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo and his men are working on some of the more obvious things, like tightening up the run defense. It’s been a problem throughout the season, and Spagnuolo is continuing to figure out what works best for the Chiefs there.
“We begin with the run game,” Spagnuolo said. “There were plenty of things for us to keep our eye on. It’s going to begin [with the run game] but it always does. There were some good things, some good plays in there and some things that we’d like to get rid of. The explosive plays are always the ones that jump out at me.”
As Spagnuolo works to eliminate explosive plays in the ground game and build consistency, he’ll continue to preach situational awareness and disciplined play through the months of November and December. They can become increasingly important late in the year.
Hopefully, we’ll get a look at the coaching tweaks on both sides of the ball that occurred during the bye week when Kansas City takes the field for the upcoming Week 13 game against Oakland.
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