Patrick Mahomes Week 6 film review; Under pressure and finding answers to man coverage

Looking more closely at how the pass protection fell apart against Buffalo, as well as examining some of the answers to man coverage.

Each week here, I’ll be reviewing every snap by Patrick Mahomes, charting things that gauge quarterback performance and measuring traits like accuracy, pocket presence, vision/awareness, playmaking, and ball protection. The idea is to quantify how the quarterback played beyond the box score and contextualize his play from supporting cast and scheme. You can find the terms and methodology here. This week, we’ll be looking more closely at some general themes, such as pass protection issues against Buffalo and how the Chiefs can answer man coverage.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so I’m just going to get right to it; The pass protection stunk against Buffalo. Truly, genuinely stunk.

When I first watched the game live, I was under the impression that Patrick Mahomes contributed to the problem with happy feet and creating some rush lanes. I also wasn’t entirely sure whether or not the coverage down the field might have been more of an issue than the protection itself. In other words, I didn’t quite know the “first cause” issue behind the offense struggling to put up points against the Bills (other than some self-inflicted errors).

And so for this week’s Mahomes film review, I thought I’d examine those issues more closely. While I’m still charting every snap by Mahomes, I’m going to go a bit more in-depth on two other issues. First, I charted where the pressure was coming from on the 21 “flush” plays (TWENTY-ONE, people) where Mahomes was pressured/hit/sacked or moved off his spot earlier than he should be on the play. Second, I took a closer look at how the Chiefs can deal with the sort of aggressive man coverage that the Bills showed at key moments of the game.

If you are unfamiliar with how I chart and write about quarterback play, the (unlocked) Week 1 review explains the methodology and reasoning, as well as the definitions used. The goal, as ever, is to separate the QB’s play from what is around the QB to get a better gauge on how he did on his own. You can find the previous views by clicking the links below:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

(no Week 5 due to some travel time for me)

Let’s talk some Mahomes film and some larger overall takeaways from the Chiefs’ performance against Buffalo.