Third down and drawing a crowd; How Chris Jones affected the Chargers game in multiple ways
The Chiefs' superstar defensive tackle showed once again why being a playmaker matters, as he and the rest of the Chiefs defense helped Mahomes haul in an ugly win.
The biggest play of the evening didn’t belong to Chris Jones. And that’s somehow fitting for Jones, for reasons I’ll talk about shortly.
The biggest play of the night for the Chiefs in the battle for early AFC West Supremacy came from 7th round rookie Jaylen Watson, who earned his way into the 4th CB role with a strong preseason and was pressed into action with starter Trent McDuffie out. After giving up some tough contested catches to Mike Williams early, Watson shook it off to make the play that will rightly be pointed at as the moment the tide turned for Kansas City.
It’s important to not understate the importance of this play. For starters, it was a massive points swing, as the Chargers were knocking on the door of scoring at least a field goal and instead the Chiefs hung 7 points on the board. A 10 point swing (again, at the least) is a huge shift in a close game. In fact, Next Gen Stats tweeted that Kansas City’s win probability swung from 31% to 85% with the pick-six, a massive change. It was the play of the night, and Watson deserves his due.
But I’ll talk about the rookie CB later (when the all-22 is out). Right now, I want to talk about Chris Jones, who once again managed to swing the game at multiple points but will fly under the radar this week amidst the talk of Watson’s huge play and some of the flaws the Chiefs' need to work through moving forward.
I can’t let that stand. So let’s talk about Chris Jones, one of the most (at least in my opinion) underappreciated superstars in the league, and how his work on 3rd down and the attention he forces teams to give him helped swing last night’s game in a way that went relatively unnoticed.