The Kansas City Chiefs' opening drive in Week 3 was a snapshot of how hard Patrick Mahomes has had to grind to move the football this season.
The offense toiled for 17 plays and eight-and-a-half minutes, Kansas City's second-longest drive of the season and the longest drive of the game. And once the Chiefs got into the red zone, Mahomes gave up the football. He threw an interception on a pass intended for tight end Noah Gray.
The throw was ill-timed. It smelled like impatience. It was everything we don't expect from Mahomes and yet a bit of what we've seen of him this season. Through three games, he has five touchdowns and four interceptions.
But Kansas City is 3-0, so no one is panicking.
Still, it's fair to wonder if this offense is worse than the 2023 unit. During the offseason, the Chiefs let some defensive players go in order to improve the offense. But that improvement has yet to come to fruition.
The opening drive felt exemplary of how things haven't gone to plan for the offense. The Chiefs had to manufacture touches for rookie Xavier Worthy. Tight end Travis Kelce managed only one catch for one yard. Running back Isiah Pacheco and receiver Hollywood Brown are injured. In turn, Rashee Rice has assumed the role as the top playmaker on offense after Mahomes.
Kelce, in particular, is not playing his best football. He has eight catches for 69 yards over three games. And while Mahomes, Kelce and coach Andy Reid have chalked up the veteran tight end's lack of production to defenses hitting him with double teams, Kelce has faced them his entire career.
Why is he suddenly letting double teams get in his way? Are the Chiefs merely resting him for January and February? Or are we starting to see the decline of Kelce, who turns 35 in October? The answer is only likely to come in time.
The attention on Kelce has led to success for Rice, who is making the most of his touches. He has 24 catches for 288 yards and two touchdowns. He leads the NFL in YAC at 186, substantially higher than the No. 2 receiver, Tampa Bay's Chris Godwin with 138.
But it wasn't exactly the plan to put the offense on Rice's shoulders.
That's the exact grind Mahomes did not want to get back to. In fact, it's worse than last year's grind, because Kelce is basically uninvolved.
Here's what Mahomes said this offseason when looking back at the 2023 season.
"We really didn't play football the way we wanted to play all year long. It wasn't fun," he said. "Every single week having to try to just continue to just get better and better and the results not paying off the way you want it to."
He shared a similar sentiment after last Sunday's game, a 22-17 win over the Falcons.
"We haven't played good; I mean really all three games. We've been able to win. That speaks to the character of the team, the grit, how we've been in these situations before," Mahomes said. "I feel like I haven't played very well. And that's not a stats thing. I just feel like I'm missing opportunities whenever they're out there and not throwing the ball in the exact spot I want it to be at."
The idea was to get Worthy and Brown open downfield, thereby opening up things for Rice and Kelce over the middle. But right now for the Chiefs, things are awfully crowded in the intermediate area, which might be why they've avoided throwing to Kelce. They don't want their star tight end getting hurt at this point in the season — when their elite defense and Mahomes' gift for situational football is enough to win games.
When you look at Mahomes' passing chart, it's not all that different from Daniel Jones' after three weeks. Mahomes is throwing the football like a mediocre quarterback — on paper. Kansas City's offense has none of the personality that it had late in the season last year. The Chiefs are winning because Mahomes is getting as many yards as he needs when they're most needed. In short, he's playing good situational football.
Rice's 13-yard touchdown last Sunday is a great example. On a third-and-3, the Falcons showed an all-out blitz. They ended up rushing five and keeping a linebacker in the middle of the field, likely as a spy for Mahomes. The quarterback got the ball out quickly to Rice on the perimeter, who ran into the end zone untouched, in large part because of Mahomes' quick release.
But it wasn't the Mahomes we're used to seeing — creative and wild. He's not making highlights with this current cast. And he's seemingly making even fewer than last year with Kelce out of the mix.
The questions for the Chiefs moving forward is whether they can deploy Kelce more actively, whether they can get Worthy to manufacture his own touches and whether Brown has an impact on the offense when he returns from injury.
It isn't like the Chiefs can't win games with their offense as it is. We've seen that they can. But the question is whether they can win another Super Bowl — their third straight.
If that's going to happen, the offense will have to evolve. It will have to loosen up and find ways to get Mahomes out of structure. Kelce will have to get Mahomes throwing behind the back. Worthy and Brown will have to get Mahomes throwing over the top of defenses. And Rice can keep doing exactly what he's been doing.
The pieces can still fall back into place.
That's what the Chiefs have done in previous years: figure it out. That's what the Patriots did during their dynastic run. They underwent growing pains in the early weeks to give life to Super Bowl runs.
And so here's the scary conclusion.
If the Chiefs are treating these opening weeks like the preseason (and resting their aging veteran in Kelce and saving their creative, world-beating plays for later in the year), then that's incredibly bad news for the NFL. Because when the Patriots did stuff like this, they'd be 2-2 and 1-3 after four weeks. The Chiefs could start 4-0 if they beat the Chargers, who may not have Justin Herbert on Sunday.
Mahomes is playing some of the worst football of his career. That won't last.
Reid is running a fairly vanilla offense. That won't last.
Kelce is wholly uninvolved in the passing game. That won't last.
If that's all true, then it's inevitable that the Chiefs offense improves.
If anything, it might be time for defensive coordinators to panic. They are probably watching this game film and thinking: We're gonna need a bigger boat.
