Chiefs Are Growing Up Fast After Their Win Over the 49ers

A big win helps Andy Reid’s team accelerate its learning curve. Plus, the Seahawks are anything but screwed up, and the Titans are still the Titans.

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If you ask Chiefs coach Andy Reid for his favorite play from Sunday’s 44–23 romp over the 49ers, his answer might surprise you. I don’t know for sure that Joshua Williams’s pick at the end of the first half—the 6'3" fourth-round corner out of Fayetteville State skied over San Francisco’s Ray-Ray McCloud to pick off Jimmy Garoppolo at the goal line—would be the one. But after talking to him as the Chiefs made their way to the San Francisco airport early Sunday night, I get the feeling it was up there for the 64-year-old.

And it wasn’t just the play, or how consequential a play it was, though it just so happened to be spectacular and consequential. It’s what it signified for the 23-year-old as a player.

“I thought, Albert, if you just took [Williams] and saw him last week versus this week,” Reid said. “I said after the game, some of our young guys would learn. And it’s a phenomenal experience for them, that Buffalo game. And then you saw what 23 did today, his confidence level. He had the interception. A week ago, that didn’t happen. Today, he learned from it, and I thought it really helped him last week.”

Mahomes lit up the 49ers with a season-high 423 yards passing and three touchdowns :: Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports

Ditto, said Reid, for seventh-round rookie corner Jaylen Watson, and handfuls of other Chiefs who’d gotten their big-game sea legs against Josh Allen and the Bills.

And as Reid’s going through this, you realize the Chiefs are really young in spots with a lot of ascending players who should help Mahomes keep competing for rings. Seven of 11 starters on defense are Kansas City draft picks still on rookie contracts. On offense, younger pieces such as Creed Humphrey, Trey Smith, Noah Gray and Isiah Pacheco have carved out roles.

Along those lines, Mahomes is now the third-longest-tenured Chief, behind only Travis Kelce and Chris Jones, and the newest guys, to be sure, have a lot of catching up to do in the department of big games. Which is why getting to play the Bills and 49ers back to back, Reid thinks, is going to accelerate the growth of those guys.

“It’s the stage and then that competition,” Reid said. “And the Niners have a lot of talent, so now you can trust what you see and then go get it.”

The Chiefs did just that at Levi’s Stadium. Or, more specifically, they did in the game’s second half after taking a one-point lead, and they did it with droves of contributors.

One piece was absolutely a growing young defense continuing to ascend with young talent in the back seven (Williams, Watson, L’Jarius Sneed, Juan Thornhill, Willie Gay Jr., Nick Bolton) augmenting a front still driven by Jones and Frank Clark.

The other, on offense, also has more fresh faces than you might realize. JuJu Smith-Schuster was targeted as much as Travis Kelce was Sunday. Packers cast-off Marquez Valdes-Scantling’s three-catch, 111-yard effort was punctuated by a huge 57-yard gain in the fourth quarter on the drive that gave the Chiefs a two-possession lead. Pacheco, a rookie, led the team on the ground with 43 yards. And a lot of bringing all that together does, indeed, fall on Mahomes.

“I think we’re all seeing that,” Reid continued. “He’s got complete control of the offense, knowing when and then how to utilize guys against the different coverages. It probably shows itself more now that Ty [Tyreek Hill is] not with us, but it’s really been the last couple years that he’s just had everything right there. But everybody else gets to see it now with them spreading it around.”

And Mahomes is doing it not by design, but through the natural course of the offense. The game-sealing 45-yard touchdown to Smith-Schuster—the former Steeler came open over a dead spot in a 49ers zone, collected the ball and sprinted through the defense to the pylon—was with Mahomes, per Reid, deep into the second part of his progression. The four-yard touchdown throw to Justin Watson in the third quarter, Reid added, was in the third part of Mahomes’s progression.

Mahomes’s growing command has, in turn, benefited the Chiefs in a number of ways.

One comes with Mahomes’s ability to manage even the most unmanageable down-and-distance situations. He set up a 34-yard screen to Jerick McKinnon to convert a third-and-20 in the third quarter. On second-and-20 in the fourth quarter, Mahomes found Smith-Schuster to his right for a 14-yard catch-and-run, then Smith-Schuster again for a 45-yard touchdown. And the 57-yarder to Valdes-Scantling was on a fourth-quarter third-and-11.

“Our coaches do a great job with all that, first of all,” Reid said. “And then having Pat back there, dealing with the best third-down quarterback in the game, pulling the trigger, is special. I give credit to Matt Nagy for the job that he does with EB [Eric Bieniemy]. They just hit all of those situations and they put together that third down, and you never feel like you’re really out of it, although you don’t like being in those situations.”

Because of Mahomes’s growth as a distributor, defenses have to contend with more. And they’re coming out of some of the two-high looks the Chiefs got all last year, which allows Reid and Mahomes to go back to what they did best earlier in the 2018 MVP’s career.

“[The 49ers] played a little bit of man, and we haven’t seen a lot of man the last couple years,” Reid said. “So we’re getting a little bit more of that and then Quez [Valdes-Scantling], I mean, did a great job of winning the one-on-one battles. And where maybe we get an opportunity over the top, they’re also driving to Kels [Kelce] now. So Tyreek would be on that side. So all of those, between the man and the corners with the active safety, gives you opportunities over the top.”

Mahomes took advantage of those in a way that maybe he wouldn’t have two or three years ago. And the scary thing is, again, if you take a closer look at the roster and the guys who came up big against a very good 49ers team, he’s hardly the only one growing up fast.

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Carroll hasn't been surprised by the play of his quarterback or the six rookies who started Sunday :: Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports

Remember the questions we asked to try to figure out why Pete Carroll was giving Geno Smith all the first-team reps in Seattle over the summer?

Me, too.

“You guys thought we were all f---ed up,” said Carroll, laughing over the phone late Sunday.

Turns out, the Seahawks absolutely were not screwed up.

Smith has seven starts under his belt this season—after taking a wire-to-wire win of the summer’s QB competition—and these are his passer ratings for those games: 119.5, 80.2, 99.2, 132.6, 139.7, 82.3, 105.5. And while it’s subjective, it’d be relatively easy to make the argument that Smith is scoring even higher on the eye test, with Seattle having won three of its past four games to head into Halloween weekend—surprise!—at 4–3.

So looking back, evidently, there were very good reasons for Carroll to allow Smith to keep taking the reps with the starters. It seems that all along he was earning that much.

“This didn't come out of nowhere; we saw it every day,” Carroll said. “But we were so [wrapped up] with the way we were playing and all that, we didn’t really give him a chance to ever compete to take the job. He really didn’t. He was the backup. That was understood. But last year, he played three games, half of the Rams game and two other games, and then he popped out in the Jacksonville game and had a near-perfect game. He was 15-for-15 to start the game. That’s when you could really see this isn’t that hard for him; he can do it.

“And then he goes back to the bench and then we never see him again. … It happened to a number of guys. If you keep looking at home, you’ll find guys that have come back after years out, and they come back and they ain’t the same guy anymore. Richie Gannon is one of those guys. We’ve talked about [Jim] Plunkett. We’ve talked about even Steve Young. Guys that sat for a long time and then when they come back, they just see the game differently.

“[Ryan] Fitzpatrick is one of those guys, too. He comes back, and they see the game so much differently and it’s slowed down. And now, if they have the ability and skill at that age, which Geno does, fortunately he can still run, and he’s throwing the hell out of it, they can take advantage of all that experience.”

But, really, this is who Smith’s been for seven weeks now.

The difference Sunday was how these sorts of performances seem to be coming from everywhere else for the Seahawks, too—which is why, efficient as Smith was, he still didn’t need to throw more than 27 times or for more than 210 yards, and Seattle could withstand a pick from him, to get a convincing 37–23 win over a talented Chargers group.

The reason for that rides with a handful of other rising players all about a decade younger than the 32-year-old Smith.

This year happens to be one of two in which the Seahawks will feel the windfall of trading away Russell Wilson in the draft. And if how they handled 2022 is any indication, then they’ll be talking full advantage of trading a franchise icon.

No fewer than six (!!!) 2022 draft picks started for the Seahawks on Sunday—tackles Charles Cross and Abe Lucas, tailback Kenneth Walker III, edge rusher Boye Mafe, and corners Coby Bryant and Tariq Woolen. All have shown promise. So all are getting their shot.

“The guys came in, and they were all capable. They were all physically able to do it, and then mentality-wise, they were able to handle the pressure and take it on, so it’s really good for us,” Carroll said. “I think we’re playing more rookies than anybody, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that big a deal. I’ve always felt like we wanted to do that, even back to the SC days, we would always play freshmen.

“And we just tried not to play them too much, where we could help them be successful and then expand them once we get to the halfway point. And it’s happened a little bit faster with these guys, because they’re all really capable and really good.”

Reminders of that were everywhere during Sunday’s win, and maybe most emphatically in how Seattle closed out the hosts at SoFi—with Walker racing 74 yards, barely touched, behind Lucas and up the right sideline to make the score 37–16 with less than seven minutes left.

“That really was for the whole team,” Carroll said of Walker’s run. “Because we take a lot of pride in playing physical football, and we’re back. We’re really back to the mentality better than we have been at this point, and everybody understands why. Geno only threw the ball 27 times today, and he was really efficient again, he was over 100 on his rating again, and that all fits together. It’s what we’re trying to get done to play really good football.”

The easy thing to do here would be to compare this situation—with Smith, the rising talent around him and all the winning—to what’s happening in Denver.

But what’s more relevant is how, finally, it feels like the arrow’s pointing back up in Seattle.

“It totally does,” Carroll said. “It always felt like that. We just had to suffer through some of the hitches along the way. We felt like that all the way back when we started this thing, the leadership that took over and the way we lifted, the way they prepared and the attitude that they maintained, let us think that the whole time. We just didn’t quite get those games after the Denver game. We had a nice start and then we got smacked in San Francisco.

“We didn’t score, we didn’t do anything. And then we came back, and the offense has been on fire since. And the defense, they’ve made their turn, and so everybody feels that we’re going to try to capture the hell out of this thing right now.”

Behind a pretty unlikely leader, they’re succeeding with that.

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The Titans haven't lost since a players-only meeting led by Byard and the team's five other captains after their Week 2 loss to the Bills :: George Walker IV/Tennessean.com/USA TODAY Sports

The Titans are still the Titans.

They lost their season opener on a buzzer-beating field goal to the Giants, got blown out by the Bills on a Monday night eight days later, and then the injury bug bit (Harold Landry, Taylor Lewan, etc.), and it seemed like time may have passed Tennessee’s core by.

Except the team’s six captains had other ideas.

The day after the loss to the Bills, those guys called a closed-door, players-only summit.

“Me, Derrick Henry, [Ryan] Tannehill, Ben Jones, Jeffery Simmons, all of us, just stood in front of the team and said our words, said our piece about how we felt we were as a team,” safety Kevin Byard said. “There wasn’t anything too crazy. We just felt like we just needed to address some things as a team, as captains.”

The Titans haven’t lost since, winning their fourth straight with Sunday’s 19–10 knockout of the Colts. They’ve now swept the team most saw as their chief competition in the AFC South.

Sunday’s win was highlighted by 138 yards on the ground, with 128 coming from Henry on 30 carries. Tannehill managed the game with just 132 yards passing. And the defense, while imperfect, made game-changing plays and got them from some unlikely places.

“We just take a lot of pride in making plays,” Byard said. “There’s been a lot of talk about the big plays we’ve been giving up, which is true. But I talked to the DBs last night and I was like, Hey, we’re not going to play to not get beat. We’re going to play to go out there and make plays and have fun and celebrate with each other. It was good for everybody to get those turnovers. And the thing about it is, man, Andrew Adams and Terrance Mitchell just got there in the middle of the season. It’s not like they’ve been here all through training camp.

“So I got to brag on those guys; they did a great job of just learning the defense and just taking advantage of the opportunities. That’s what it’s all about; I’m happy for those guys.”

Indeed, Titans GM Jon Robinson and coach Mike Vrabel poached Adams off the Steelers’ practice squad Sept. 21 and Mitchell off the Patriots’ practice squad that same day.

Adams was the first of the two to make his mark against the Colts. He undercut Parris Campbell deep in Titans territory to pick off Matt Ryan in the second quarter before racing 76 yards for a touchdown to give Tennessee a 10–0 lead.

“The pick-six was pretty cool, because they lined up in empty [backfield] which, just keeping it real, we didn’t really have an empty check,” Byard said. “But me being a leader on the field, I kind of just see the formation and checked it to a defense where they thought we were in blitz-zero and we weren’t. And so he just threw the ball out hot, and obviously we all had vision of the quarterback breaking to drive on the ball, and he made a great play.”

The Colts came back, as they seem to have weekly this year, and that’s where the defense came up big again. With Tennessee leading 19–10, Indianapolis seemingly had converted a third-and-3, with Ryan (heating up now) hitting Michael Pittman Jr. for nine yards over the middle to move into Titans territory. But at the end of the play, with a little over three minutes left, Mitchell swiped at the ball and jarred it loose.

Initially, the officials called Pittman down. Byard knew he wasn’t, and even, at first, thought he’d knocked the ball free coming in second on the receiver. The truth was that by the time he got there, Mitchell had already gotten the ball free, with Amani Hooker there to jump on it. Either way, the play was overturned, which more or less ended the game.

“Terrance Mitchell comes on, and he hammers the ball. And that’s something we work on weekly with the second guy coming in to punch the ball out,” Byard said. “Just happy for him cause when he first got here, he had a game where he felt like he gave us some plays and we had talks in the locker room about staying at it, staying hungry, staying ready for his opportunity. And there we go, a guy made a play to end the game to win it for us.”

In doing so, Mitchell put the Titans in control in the AFC South. And Tennessee got there with a look that’s pretty familiar to anyone who follows the NFL, even without guys like Lewan or Landry on the field, or A.J. Brown with the team anymore.

”Last year we set a record for as many players that we had playing for our team, so this is nothing new to us,” Byard said. “We kind of just approach everything, it’s going to sound cliché, with a next-man-up mentality. Whoever’s in there is gonna be treated like a starter. Guys got to prepare like starters that are backups. So it’s just a testament to our culture and just the way we play football and how we prepare, and just our mentality going into every single game.”

It’s a distinctive one, for sure.

And it definitely works for those guys—and evidently a lot of other guys, too.