It would be very easy to look at this week's matchup between the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs and assume that the Chiefs are going to roll over a Patriots team that only has draft position to play for. However, dig a little deeper and forget for a second the teams we're dealing with for a second, and you'll see that this is a matchup between a vulnerable Super Bowl contender that is in a tailspin going up against a head coach/defensive mastermind who has made a Hall of Fame career of scheming up game plans to slow down the league's best offenses. And even more intriguing… each of the last three times Bill Belichick and the Patriots have faced Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, Kansas City's offense has put up fewer points than they did in the previous meeting.
During the 2018 regular season, the Patriots survived a 43-40 shootout against the Chiefs. Just a few months later they played an instant classic in the AFC Championship Game, which the Patriots won 37-31 in overtime. The next season, New England held Mahomes and the Chiefs offense to 23 points, and in 2020, the last time the Chiefs and Patriots played each other, Kansas City's offense was limited to 19 points in a win over the Patriots.
So yes, history does seem to be on New England's side here, and Bill Belichick certainly has the CV to suggest that he'll be able to press the right buttons to limit the Chiefs offense and give New England a chance to hang around in the game. But it's not just history that is on New England's side.
The Kansas City Chiefs offense is in the midst of their first major dip in the Patrick Mahomes era. Sure, they've endured a handful of multi-week stretches that had analysts foolishly wondering whether the demise of this mini-dynasty was underway, but never anything as prolonged as we've seen this year. In 2018, Mahomes' first year as the starter in Kansas City, the Chiefs averaged an insane 35.3 points per game. Though they haven't been up above 30 points per game since then, in the four seasons that followed, the Chiefs have been somewhere between 28.2 and 29.6 points per game. Until this year.
As we head into week 15, the Chiefs are averaging 22.5 points per game, which puts them outside of the top ten in the league — a notion that very recently seemed impossible for a team quarterbacked by someone as talented as Patrick Mahomes. The most common party to take the blame for this dip in offensive production is a group of pass-catchers that leads the league in drops (and in bonehead plays that cost the Chiefs wins in high-profile matchups). However, I'm here to tell you that we're letting Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy off the hook. Sure, Matt Nagy isn't responsible for the drops, but analysts had similar concerns about the Chiefs pass-catchers heading last year, and if my memory serves me correctly, Kansas City came away with their second Super Bowl title in four years.
As a Bears fan, I spent four years watching just how inept Matt Nagy was as a play-caller. And in this matchup against Bill Belichick, Nagy will be playing checkers while Belichick is playing three-dimensional chess.
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