Going full Thanos; Patrick Mahomes' ability to create yards won the game for the Chiefs
On a day nothing was working on offense, Mahomes put on the infinity gauntlet and did it himself, showing once again how his combination of operating both in structure and out of it is unmatched.
There are a lot of reasons teams win games in the NFL. Sometimes it’s due to having more talent. Sometimes it’s due to executing the gameplan better. Sometimes one coach just outfoxes the other and creates an edge throughout the matchup. Sometimes one style trumps another. Sometimes (often, maybe?) it’s just about who gets a little more lucky.
And sometimes, it’s because one team has the best player in the world and the other does not.
It wasn’t pretty. And frankly, for most of the night, it wasn’t even fun. The Titans and their head coach Mike Vrabel were once again ahead of Andy Reid and the Chiefs’ offense for most of the evening. It didn’t help that Kansas City kept shooting itself in the foot with poorly-timed penalties and other self-inflicted errors. But the short story of the game was that the Chiefs were struggling to get anything going whatsoever on offense.
And then Mahomes, well… he Mahomes’d.
When the Chiefs absolutely, desperately needed yards and points, Mahomes found himself in a situation where he was forced to take his inspiration from Thanos and just do it himself. It’s easy to miss it in the week-by-week grind of the NFL, but watching a player hoist a team on his shoulders and force a win where they had no business winning is something we should never, ever take for granted. And tonight, we’re not going to.
Let’s talk about the way Mahomes used his arms and his legs to drag the Chiefs offense kicking and screaming down the field on their final two scoring drives, and how on a day yards were hard to come by they needed every single one of the yards he created.