The Kansas City Chiefs will be running more this year to try and revive their dormant play-action game.
The Kansas City Chiefs are doing things differently on offense this year, and there’s a lot thag goes into the changes. The reasons for the changes became clear, however, when coach Andy Reid starting watching the tape from last year’s disastrous 6-11 season and he kept seeing the same thing over and over again.
"If you watch the level two defenders, the linebackers and or a safety coming up in the box, if we're selling a play-action and those guys are dropping [into coverage], they're not honoring the run game," Reid said last week in a piece written by Nate Taylor of ESPN. "There's something that they're seeing and not respecting."
Hopefully that changes with the addition of running back Kenneth Walker, as there were some bad stats that came with it. The Chiefs used play action on 178 snaps last season, according to Taylor, and they generated 977 yards in those snaps, which ranked 2oth in the league.
"Well, play-action has always been a big part of this offense," Reid said. "We look at the production of it. What are you getting out of it [on film]? You might as well just dropback and forget about the play-action."
Walker’s preference is to work under center rather than flanking the quarterback in the shotgun, so the Chiefs are employing quarterback Patrick Mahomes to accommodate him. The move makes sense given that Mahomes is rehabilitating from serious knee surgery, so the Chiefs don’t quite know how he’s going to look in live action.
They also know that Walker was fourth in the percentage of runs that went for more than ten yards with the Seattle Seahawks last year, and they want to see him duplicate that -- a lot.
"No. 9. That's all I can say," Mahomes said, referencing Walker's jersey number, when asked what intrigues him most about the offense. "That change and the ability to catch, run, pass protect, do everything. [He can] make a play out of nothing into a 20-yard gain. That's going to be the biggest impact, I think, we'll have -- just finding the ways to get him the ball."
The Chiefs also didn’t get many longer plays off play action, as Mahomes attempted just seven passes that traveled more than 20 yards downfield. That left one of his big strengths on the table, and tight end Travis Kelce commented on what needs to happen to change that.
"We've got a lot of great players on this offense," Kelce said. "It's not just me. We've got some young guys that can play. [Worthy is] a man on a mission right now, and I love the way he's working and his attention to detail and how he's running his routes and just the aggression that he's running his routes in.
"Pat has done an unbelievable job of not only getting himself ready, but working with these receivers and making sure that everybody's living up to that standard of how we're going to play this year."
Reid added that the goal is to put those back defenders in what he called “recovery mode,” which creates seams that can be exploited. It’s a new way of doing business in Kansas City this year, and the Chiefs are betting their season that it will work.
