The Kansas City Chiefs are under fire from multiple critics, including fans, experts and anyone else who cares to weigh in. Most of this criticism isn’t worth paying attention to, but Steven Ruiz of The Ringer did an intriguing section in his quarterback notebook this week that focused on how the Chiefs are “breaking” quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
He makes some compelling points, starting with Mahomes scramble rate. It’s way up this year, with nine percent of Mahomes’ dropbacks ending in scrambles. He leads the league in that department, and Ruiz pointed out that Mahomes only approached that number in one other season—last year when the offense was clearly broken and drops plagued the Chiefs all year.
Sunday night’s loss to the Houston Texans was yet another example of this. According to Ruiz, “The entire contest was one big indictment of the job Andy Reid and Brett Veach have done building around their superstar quarterback.”
That’s more than a little extreme, but it is accurate as a yardstick for how many things have gone wrong this year. Ruiz also chose some videos to illustrate his point, and the Chiefs’ tape doesn’t lie this year.
He also offered criticism of Andy Reid’s concepts and coaching decisions, which is relatively new. It’s not unjustified, either, especially down the stretch with Reid’s fourth-down gambles. It almost felt like Reid was coaching a different version of the Chiefs, probably the one from earlier this year when the wide receiver group was consistently catching balls and feasting on opportunities to get open.
Mahomes also took a beating against the Texans, and that’s perhaps a bigger problem. It’s not just that Mahomes left some throws short and had others that were bad in ways we haven’t seen before, but it feels like only a matter of time before the Kansas City quarterback gets seriously injured, which would bring the curtain down on all this in the worst way possible.
Is there any answer for all this? Probably not, given how bad things have gone in the last month, but one option would be to start protecting Mahomes more. It would go against Reid’s nature to start using max-protect schemes for his quarterback, but it’s a better option that Ruiz’s final point, which is that a faster elimination from the playoffs might be the only way to protect Mahomes and safely get him to the 2026 season with his heath intact.