About 45 minutes or so into our conversation, Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy hit me with a point of clarification—in the bedlam of the postgame locker room, he and I had gone over Kansas City’s fourth-and-1 play call, and I was actually a bit off in how I saw it.
I’d asked if it was a zone-read concept. He said it was. Technically, conceptually, that wasn’t wrong. But he told me Friday that he’d actually mixed up the call with Patrick Mahomes’s big run earlier in Super Bowl LVIII, one that chewed up 22 yards in the third quarter and set up Harrison Butker’s 57-yard field goal. That one, it turns out, was the run-pass option play. The later one, on maybe the biggest snap of the entire game, was just made to look like one.
To me, in the moment, they looked pretty much identical.
Which was exactly the idea.
“Put it this way—it’s good that you’re asking this question, because we want them to all look the same,” Nagy says. “They can look very, very similar. That’s ultimately our goal is to make stuff look the same. Within the call, we have to make the decision as to whether we want it to be one where he’s reading the end or one where we’re just going to say, ‘We’re going to take a chance on you pulling the ball, making it look like a run [to the back].’ So it’s going to look the same, but we know inside the huddle that we're pulling it.”
Football minutiae? Sure.
But to me, it also illustrated why these Chiefs are so hard to beat.
On one hand, you have Andy Reid’s ever-evolving offense, one with West Coast roots that continues to adapt to the times—in the early days ex-Nevada coach Chris Ault came in to help Reid, Nagy and Doug Pederson better understand and implement the pistol and some of the option concepts coming out of the college game—and grows off its foundation to become tougher to deal with by the day.
On the other hand, there’s a simpler way to explain all this, and that’s to just say, without qualifiers, the game was on the line and it was time to put the ball in the hands of the best player in the sport, a player who’s just 28 years old and seemingly getting harder and harder to vanquish on these, the biggest of stages.
From there, as Nagy and I worked our way through the rest of our talk, I was busy adding those two things together in my head, with a single thought rattling around up there.
