Look At This Photograph: Chiefs Beat a Bad Team, Themselves
It’s never a good thing when fans are arguing whether the offense or the defense was worse. Both were pretty terrible on Sunday. There are certainly some good excuses, most notably, the wholesale injuries on the team, but I’m just not that interested in making them. It’s one thing when you see an injury plagued team get destroyed, it’s another entirely when miscues turn a gritty win into a gut-wrenching loss. The simple truth is that Tampa Bay didn’t beat the good Chiefs team we’ve all become accustomed to. Rather, a bad Chiefs team beat themselves, with everything that has epitomized the offense on display.
With that being said, I wanted to review the plays that actually won the game. Here, they are en-capsuled in a series of tragic images.
It all starts, as usual, with Andy Reid getting cute. Chiefs might have the fastest player in the NFL in Tyreek Hill. DAT isn’t too slow himself. Nah, we’re gonna run a TE sweep. Quick question, am I the only one who’s never heard of a TE sweep? This play went about as well as you’d expect, and Chiefs were forced to settle for a field goal.
This picture is an explanation of sorts. Most of us have been asking why Conely isn’t targeted more. He seems to catch anything that touches his hands. A skill-set that, no doubt alienates him from his fellow receivers who like to… drop it like it‘s hot. Perhaps the reason Conely doesn’t see more targets is that his route running still leaves a lot to be desired. The Chiefs West Coast Offense is a choice based route system. This means the route changes based on what the defender does. If the WR doesn’t make the correct read, or make it fast enough, his QB may massively overthrow him like Smith did here. Smith trusted Conely enough to throw the ball before Conely was open and, if he ran the route right, it would have been a huge gain.
When your fan base has to defend you from critics, and their main argument is: “He doesn‘t turn the ball over very often and almost never in the red zone.”, it shouldn’t come as a shock that an interception in the end zone, when a FG gets you the lead, will lose you some fans and force me to type the worse run-on sentence I’ve written since I was 10 years-old. Period. Seriously, the rest of this statement is all just filler to ensure this constitutes a paragraph rather than a sentence. When Smith can’t do his job, it hurts all of us where we live.
This play didn’t technically hurt the Chiefs. Alex Smith was able to throw a touchdown to Albert Wilson, of all people, on the very next play. That said, it’s still a problem. RB Spencer Ware gets tackled by four guys behind the line of scrimmage with goal-to-go on the one-yard line. It’s that kind of horrifically bad blocking that leads head coach Andy Reid to get cute near the end zone. It’s easy for us to say: “Just punch it in!”, but, on this play, the Chiefs tried that, and it failed miserably.
The offense has received the lion’s share of my criticism thus far, and that’s fair. The defense has been carrying them for weeks now. When your starting line-up is down to four healthy starters, things are bound to look a little rough. However, I can’t give defensive coordinator Bob Sutton a total pass. Yeah, he let the Bucs march up and down the field, but his scoring defense was good. My specific issue with Sutton is, that he refuses to acknowledge that some players are better than others. This picture shows the Bucs with 3rd and 3: a stop here means Chiefs get the ball back with two minutes to score. A first down means Chiefs have almost no shot at winning. So, what does Sutton do? Oh not much, just SINGLE COVER MIKE EVANS WITH KENETH FREAKING ACKER!!! Okay, breath, breath, it’s going to be okay. In Acker’s defense, he actually did a really good job. Bucs QB Jameis Winston just put the ball where only Evans could get it. However, if I’m Sutton, I’m doubling Mike Evans at the line of scrimmage. Don’t let a team have their best weapon readily available with the game on the line. Thus, the file name for this picture is “Mike Evans, Dummies.”
Everything that is wrong with Alex Smith and Andy Reid is evident on this play. Reid can’t trust Smith to throw a Hail Mary here so he sets up something else. That’s right, down by two, with eight seconds left, the Chiefs throw the ball to one of the slowest targets on offense. I love Ware, but outrunning people is not his thing. To make matters worse, Demetrius Harris completely whiffs his block. This should be game over, but Ware miraculously gets out of bounds with three seconds left. He might as well have stayed in, it only gets worse.
You’ve got three seconds left. You could attempt a deep pass you probably won’t complete anyway, or, you can get the ball into the hands of one of the best players on offense. A guy you’ve paid the big bucks to get the job done, ladies and gentleman… Eric Fisher! Need I say more?
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And those are my “Fizzling” Takes!
