The Philadelphia Eagles were in shambles a little over two years ago.
At 4-11-1, they were being excoriated for playing third-string quarterback Nate Sudfeld in a game with playoff implications, helping push a woeful NFC East to 7-9 Washington. Coach Doug Pederson, three years removed from a Super Bowl title, was about to be fired. Franchise quarterback Carson Wentz, on a Hall of Fame track as recently as the 2019 season, had been unsettled by the decision to draft Jalen Hurts and melted behind a battered offensive line. Wentz, too, would be gone within months.
Now, the Eagles are back. Howie Roseman, the general manager many fans wanted out the door alongside Pederson and Wentz, rebuilt the roster in record time. Team owner Jeffrey Lurie nailed the head-coach hiring of Nick Sirianni, who has gone from being a news conference curiosity to the leader of the league’s best team. Hurts, who was in the middle of a 7-for-20 day before being benched for Sudfeld in that Washington game, has grown into a superstar.
Of course, there’s life after getting fired by the Eagles. Andy Reid was run out of town by the fan base in Philadelphia after posting his third losing season in 14 years amid suggestions that he had grown predictable and would never make it back to the Super Bowl. Reid immediately went to Kansas City in 2013 and revitalized the Chiefs. Plus, when he linked up with quarterback Patrick Mahomes, he suddenly figured out how to win in the playoffs! Reid’s Chiefs have won one Super Bowl and are back in their third title game in four years.
When Reid joined the Chiefs, many coaches on the previous staff were let go, as is often the case. One of them was a 31-year-old wide receivers coach by the name of Nick Sirianni who had joined the staff under Todd Haley and stuck around for the brief tenure of Romeo Crennel. It has been too long for this to be a revenge game for either coach, but let’s not pretend that what happened in the past doesn’t add at least a little bit of fuel to the fire.
These two teams played in October 2021, with Mahomes throwing five touchdown passes in a 42-30 victory. Much has changed since then. The Chiefs don’t have Tyreek Hill. The Eagles reimagined their offense, rode its success to the postseason and then had one of the best offseasons in recent memory to replenish their roster. Hurts has leveled up and then done so again.
As we start to break down everything related to Super Bowl LVII, it seems instructive to begin with the way these teams have changed and what destroyed the Chiefs the last time they were in the Super Bowl.
Can the Chiefs protect Mahomes this time?
Two years ago, the Chiefs went up against a Buccaneers team with one of the league’s deepest and most devastating pass rushes. Coordinator Todd Bowles is a creative blitz designer and pulled out some whoppers, but he didn’t really need them. Tampa Bay destroyed Kansas City up front, forcing Mahomes to scramble on nearly every pass dropback. Mahomes left the Bucs’ sideline in awe, but he wasn’t able to influence the game in a 31-9 blowout loss.
Let’s start there. With Mahomes still dealing with a high ankle sprain, should we expect the Chiefs to crumble up front against the league’s best pass rush? The Eagles finished with 15 more sacks than any other team this season and added eight more to their total in blowout playoff wins over the Giants and 49ers.
Kansas City general manager Brett Veach understandably took the Super Bowl LV loss to heart and has spent the past two years rebuilding his line. The unit in that Super Bowl started three backups. Those players are no longer on the roster, and neither are four of the starters who lined up for the Chiefs in Week 1 that season. Objective No.1 has been to protect Mahomes, whose movement and improvisational skills make him both a generational talent and an incredibly difficult quarterback to block as a lineman.
The only lineman left from that group is Andrew Wylie, who started at right tackle in the Super Bowl. The Chiefs traded a first-round pick to acquire left tackle Orlando Brown Jr., signed former Patriots guard Joe Thuney to a market-topping contract in free agency and then used middle-rounds picks on center Creed Humphrey and right guard Trey Smith in the 2021 draft. The latter two have emerged as impact players. Thuney is steady and reliable, although he struggled a bit in his battles with Bengals tackle DJ Reader in the first half a week ago.
The tackles are a bigger concern. Wylie has grown into a solid starter, but the numbers from Stats Perform note the former guard allowed eight sacks in pass protection this season. Brown is an impressive run-blocker with the physical traits to block anybody, but the converted right tackle still has too many hiccups while protecting Mahomes’ blind side. Brown struggled early in the win over the Jaguars and had his pass blocking lead to 30 incompletions this season, per ESPN Stats & Information research, the second most of any player.
This line is not perfect, but it’s much better on paper than the unit the Chiefs ran out in Super Bowl LV. Unfortunately for Mahomes & Co., though, the guys on the other side are better, too. The Bucs weren’t slouches, but the Eagles are deeper and have Haason Reddick, a pass-rusher playing at the highest level. If the Eagles control the Kansas City offense, they’ll do so with their guys up front.
Philadelphia will go 10 deep along the defensive line Sunday. While the Eagles will rotate their linemen, they’ve generally kept their players in the same spots throughout the postseason, so these are often a series of two-man groups. Reddick has almost exclusively lined up on the left side of the defense, which means he would spend his game matched up one-on-one against Wylie, Kansas City’s least imposing offensive lineman.
Reddick primarily has been backed up by Super Bowl hero Brandon Graham, who has moved into a reserve role after tearing his left Achilles a year ago. Graham still managed 11 sacks while playing just 43% of Philadelphia’s defensive snaps, which should tell you how deep the Eagles go up front.
On the other side of the center, Josh Sweat will go up on the edge against Brown. Sweat was excellent during the regular season and had 1.5 sacks against the Giants in the divisional round, but ESPN’s pass rush win rate metrics haven’t been overwhelmed by his work after he suffered a neck injury in Week 18. He’ll be backed up by veteran Robert Quinn, who had 18.5 sacks a year ago and plays about 12 defensive snaps per game for this team. Quinn would be the best pass-rusher on a handful of teams; he’s the ninth or 10th guy on this line. Normal stuff.
The Eagles also stand out on the interior, where they go six deep with tackles. The locations are a little more fluid here, but the two most frequent contributors are Javon Hargrave and Fletcher Cox. Hargrave usually plays next to Sweat, while Cox will line up alongside Reddick. Former Buccaneers Super Bowl winner Ndamukong Suh will typically rotate with Cox, while Milton Williams is more often in for Hargrave. To finish up, massive first-round pick Jordan Davis and veteran midseason pickup Linval Joseph most often play at nose tackle, directly over the center. There are a combined 13 Pro Bowl nods between the six players in this rotation.
Many of these guys weren’t on the roster when the Chiefs played the Eagles in 2021, and the Philadelphia fronts looked totally different as a result. Facing one of the league’s most pass-happy offenses a year ago, defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon all but dared the Chiefs to run. The Eagles played four-man even fronts with running lanes wide enough for Cadillacs, and even Reid couldn’t resist. The Chiefs ran the ball 37 times for 189 yards and two touchdowns. It was the eighth-most impressive rushing performance by the Chiefs in the Mahomes era by expected points added (EPA).
If you’ve watched the Eagles defense closely this season, you might have noticed they’ve shifted their defensive style up front. Gannon, one of the many Vic Fangio disciples across the NFL, has played far more five-man odd fronts this season, getting three defensive tackles into the game at the same time against the interior of the opposing offensive line. Drafting Davis (and then adding Joseph after Davis suffered a midseason ankle injury) made it possible for the Eagles to shift into those “penny” fronts more often this season. By replacing an off-ball linebacker with a tackle, it helps get the best personnel possible on the field.
The widespread adoption of Fangio’s defensive style has been one of the stories of the league over the past couple of seasons, as the Chargers, Eagles, Vikings and Rams have used principles passed down by the new defensive coordinator of the Dolphins. It’s nothing new for the Chiefs, of course; they played Fangio’s Broncos teams twice a season when he was the coach and now face Brandon Staley, a Fangio disciple, twice a season when they go up against the Chargers.
Beating Eagles defensive consultant Fangio’s defense when it has a pass rush as good as Philadelphia’s is a more difficult conundrum. It helps to get creative. The Eagles were running a different defense under Jim Schwartz when they made it to the Super Bowl in the 2017 season, but they were still built around a deep defensive line rotation.
When I previewed that Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl, I suggested the Patriots might copy a tactic from a 3-13 Giants team and use either a “sugar huddle” or the no-huddle to prevent Philly from substituting its linemen. The Pats went with heavy doses of no-huddle throughout the game, and Tom Brady threw for 505 yards and three touchdowns against one of the league’s best defenses. (Just ignore the parts in that preview about Nick Foles.)
While Brady and the Patriots had a propensity for going no-huddle before that game, the Chiefs don’t. Mahomes has gone without a huddle on nine dropbacks this season, eight of which came during two-minute drills. Going with the no-huddle or a muddle huddle also risks speeding up the game and tiring out your own defense, the latter of which eventually slowed down and sank the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game against these Eagles. Going with a modified no-huddle where the Chiefs rush to the line, prevent the Eagles from substituting and then slow down at the line of scrimmage before snapping the ball could work, but it would be a surprise if the Chiefs implemented that strategy for the first time.
If the Chiefs aren’t using tempo, there are other ways for them to attack those looks and stop the pass rush. They can use quick game and RPOs to get the ball out of Mahomes’ hands quickly, forcing the Eagles to chase down receivers and tackle in space. Mahomes is the league’s second-best quarterback by EPA per dropback when throwing within two seconds of the snap, although that obviously limits how explosive and creative he can get deeper into plays.
The Eagles can be susceptible to quick game and scramble drills, where their match rules on defense can leave receivers open. They had the league’s third-best QBR on passes thrown within two to four seconds of receiving the snap, which makes up the majority of pass attempts for most quarterbacks. They were 18th in QBR against throws within two seconds of the snap, though, and 30th in QBR on throws made after the quarterback held the ball for four or more seconds. As you can probably guess, Mahomes’ 816 passing yards on throws after four-plus seconds was more than 200 ahead of any other quarterback this season. As plays stretch longer, his advantage over the defense grows stronger.
Another way to attack Fangio’s defenses, as we saw in the game a year ago and in the matchups against Staley, has been to run the ball. The Eagles have added more bodies up front, but they still don’t have a great run defense. While Gannon coordinated the league’s top pass defense by DVOA this season, the Eagles ranked 21st against the run. Some of those numbers owed to a stretch when Davis was on injured reserve, but there’s another place they struggle against the run that I’ll hit later.
The Chiefs certainly have looked better running the ball with rookie Isiah Pacheco and veteran Jerick McKinnon taking the place of disappointing former first-round pick Clyde Edwards-Helaire, who has been out since Week 11 with his own high ankle sprain but is eligible to play Sunday. Pacheco played a season-high 57% of the offensive snaps in the win over the Bengals, and it’s becoming clear that Reid trusts him more as a runner, receiver and chipper in pass protection. McKinnon was a force catching passes in the red zone during the end of the regular season, when he had eight touchdowns over the final six weeks, but he has just two catches this postseason.
One other way for the Chiefs to eliminate the pass rush is to not bother blocking the ends. When Reid played a similarly fearsome 49ers pass rush earlier this season, he spammed the jet sweep concept in the red zone, with Mecole Hardman scoring three touchdowns as an unlikely rushing force. (One of the touchdowns technically came on a tap pass, as the ball was thrown slightly forward by Mahomes, but the concept is essentially the same.)
When teams run the jet sweep, they deliberately leave the man in front of the handoff or tap pass unblocked, trusting that the speed of the ball carrier will carry him past the free lineman and create an instant numbers advantage for the offense. In Hardman’s case, the Chiefs were confident enough on two of their three scores against San Francisco to leave two linemen unblocked, including likely Defensive Player of the Year Nick Bosa. This isn’t anything new, but it’s a particularly important concept when the other team has guys you’re worried about blocking.
Hardman, unfortunately, is out for the Super Bowl after he aggravated his pelvic injury against Cincinnati. Kadarius Toney can run on these jet sweeps and tap passes, but he suffered an ankle injury on his fourth snap of the game against the Bengals and did not return. Rookie Skyy Moore would likely be the next man up in this role, but he’s not quite as explosive. Getting back Toney as a horizontal threat would give Kansas City an important option in short yardage and in or near the red zone.
The threat of motion at the snap, whether it’s on a jet sweep or some other sort of issue, gives the Eagles problems. Philadelphia had the league’s sixth-best defense when opposing offenses were static or came to a stop before the snap. When teams had a player in motion at the time of the snap, the Eagles allowed 0.04 EPA per play, which ranked 19th.
The Chiefs use motion at the snap on 65.1% of their dropbacks — the league’s fifth-highest rate — and they’re the most successful offense when they use motion. Reid & Co. will try to use motion to slow down the pass rush, stretch the defense horizontally and create throwing lanes. Late motion also helps complicate the rules for the Eagles in their pattern match coverages, which can lead to blown assignments and big plays for the offense.
One other way to get the Eagles to change their personnel: Come on the field with four wideouts and Travis Kelce and force Gannon to match with his dime package. With Tyreek Hill in the mix, the Chiefs might have tried to beat the Philly defense with speed. After trading Hill to the Dolphins, though, Kansas City went in a different direction with its offense, one that might help it answer the difficult questions posed by the Eagles.
How the Chiefs create conflict with Travis Kelce
Reid and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy responded to Hill’s departure by getting bigger. The Chiefs replaced Hill in the lineup with 6-1 JuJu Smith-Schuster and 6-4 Marquez Valdes-Scantling, but I’m not referring to the height of their players; I’m referring to the size of their formations. Kansas City has leaned into heavier packages of playmakers and more tight ends on early downs to help control the line of scrimmage and create different sorts of mismatches.
With Hill in 2021, the Chiefs used two or more tight ends on just over 28% of their snaps. This season, that figure is up to nearly 41%. They have a specific personnel package with three tight ends, a running back and wide receiver Justin Watson, whose role in the offense grew as the season progressed. Watson missed the AFC Championship Game with an illness, but with Hardman out, the 6-2 former Bucs wideout should come back into the lineup.
Going jumbo (three tight ends) away from the end zone has its benefits. The extra blockers make it easier for the Chiefs to run the ball and create longer paths for pass-rushers who want to go around the edge to get to the quarterback. Teams have to match with their base defenses, which allows Reid and Bieniemy to know what they’re getting from the opposing coach and creates opportunities for mismatches. When the Chiefs throw out of their jumbo package, they have been nearly unstoppable, going 40-of-55 for 552 yards with nine touchdowns. Again, no other offense is within 200 yards of these totals.
Here’s an example from Week 11 of how it can work against a Fangio-style defense. The Chiefs come out with three tight ends, and the Chargers decide to stay in their nickel package. That’s usually a good look for running the ball, but Kansas City doesn’t need an excuse to take a shot. It brings Jody Fortson in motion and has him run a wheel route, using the speed of the motion and a natural rub (or pick) to create some space between the tight end and cornerback Bryce Callahan. McKinnon is wide open in the flat for an easy checkdown, but Mahomes has a size mismatch with 6-4 Fortson against 5-9 Callahan and tosses up one of his best passes of the season:
The Chargers might have preferred to stay in a nickel package on that snap because the Chiefs were facing second-and-15 and had a tight end unlike any other player in the league. Kelce isn’t the only tight end in the league who can split out and excel away from the rest of the formation, but he’s the only one who can do it at a high level. He averaged 1.94 yards per route run split out this season, which is incredible given that no other tight end topped even 1.0 in the same situations. Having a player who can be a de facto wide receiver in these formations and a traditional inline tight end when the Chiefs go with smaller personnel groups is a huge advantage for Reid as a playcaller. No matter how the defense lines up to stop Kelce, it’s wrong.
Reid’s most famous alignment with Kelce has been to align his star pass-catcher on the backside of 1×3 formations, with Kelce alone on one side of the formation and three wideouts bunched together on the other side of the field. Again, the goal is to create a schematic mismatch. Double Kelce with a safety or a linebacker and the defense is left with four men to cover three receivers on the other side of the field, which is usually a matchup Reid can win with his scheme. If a defense wants to play a middle-of-the-field defender, it’s left with a cornerback or an isolated safety one-on-one against Kelce, which is a terrible matchup for defenses.
This was a far different Eagles defense the last time these two teams played. We saw Gannon trust No. 1 cornerback Darius Slay, playing aggressive man coverage against Kelce at the line of scrimmage in those 1×3 looks. Philadelphia played man coverage on nearly 49% of its snaps in that 2021 game, well above its season-long average of 36%. It didn’t go well: The Chiefs threw for 11.5 yards per attempt and posted a perfect QBR of 100 against man coverage.
Having Slay and James Bradberry in the mix guarantees the Eagles can have an excellent cover corner against Kelce one-on-one, regardless of the side he ends up on at the snap. Instead, the Eagles likely will be more aggressive in getting Kelce on the move. The Chiefs love using short motion to hide him behind a wide receiver in the slot, preventing the opposing team from getting its hands on the future Hall of Famer immediately and creating favorable leverage opportunities for him as he enters his route. As The Kansas City Star’s Jesse Newell noted in his article on the Chiefs leveraging motion into a weapon, Kelce is the league’s No. 1 receiver when targeted in motion this season.
The Chiefs also will use Kelce as a chip against great edge rushers before belatedly releasing him into his route. This has the effect of both slowing down the rush and making it more difficult to double-team him, given that the players whose first assignment might be to double him have to wait to see whether he’s actually staying in to block and might move on to help in coverage against another receiver. Kelce gets a handful of short, efficient checkdowns coming out late into the play each week.
Gannon and the Eagles have to try to take Kelce away, of course. As The Athletic’s Ted Nguyen noted in his look at the Fangio defense, when Kelce splits out, the Eagles can run something like “Roll Luggage 87,” which allows them to keep a safety over the top on Kelce’s side of the field at all times while simultaneously managing to get as many as eight defenders in the run fit. In the AFC Championship Game, Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo called versions of “1 Double 87,” a double-team concept Bill Belichick made famous for taking out the opposing team’s top receiving threat over the years.
There are several ways to take Kelce out of the game plan. They might work for a play, a series or even for a quarter or two, but Reid, Mahomes and Kelce always seem to find a way to get their opportunity. The Fangio defenses can slow down Kelce, but I’m reminded of a Chargers-Chiefs game in 2021 when Staley had Kelce stopper Derwin James on the field. James is one of the few players with the size and speed to compete with Kelce, but when the star safety left the game with a hamstring injury in the third quarter, Kelce took over:
If there is a relative weakness on this Philadelphia defense, it’s up the middle at linebacker and safety. T.J. Edwards had his best season, and Kyzir White was an upgrade on the various linebackers the team rolled out this season, but the Eagles won’t want to see either player matched up against Kelce.
Former Saints slot cornerback C.J. Gardner-Johnson joined the Eagles via trade just before the season and moved to safety, but with regular slot cornerback Avonte Maddox out for the divisional round game against the Giants, Gannon moved Gardner-Johnson back into his role in the slot and kept Reed Blankenship in the lineup next to safety Marcus Epps. Maddox returned for the NFC Championship Game but played only 19 snaps against a 49ers team without a functional quarterback for most of the day. Maddox should play in the Super Bowl, but if he aggravates his toe injury, the Eagles might need to move Gardner-Johnson back into his former role again.
The battle for third down
I’ve talked a lot about scheme, but there are two situations when the Chiefs have the football that might end up playing a key role in deciding this game. They both take place on third down, which is unique. We normally think about teams being a good third-down offense or a good third-down defense, but not all third downs are created equal, and Kansas City and Philadelphia look drastically different as those situations change.
Let’s start with a rare place in which both these teams are weak: third-and-short, which I’ll define here as third downs with 3 or fewer yards to go for a new set of downs. The Chiefs, who finished as the league’s second-best team overall on third down, converted just 51.5% of the time on third-and-short, which was the fourth-worst mark.
NFL teams pick up first downs about 69% of the time when they run in these situations, but the Chiefs converted just 52% of their rushes on third-and-short in 2022. In part, that’s because Reid made a clear decision to protect his quarterback; Mahomes hasn’t been used on sneak attempts since he suffered a dislocated kneecap on a sneak against the Broncos in 2019. Mahomes told reporters in September that he was saving a sneak for the Super Bowl, so if there was ever a time for the Chiefs to get on the push sneak bandwagon, it would be now.
Stoppable object, meet movable force. The Eagles are a league-average defense on third-and-short, allowing teams to convert 60% of the time, but they have a notable weakness: They can’t stop the short-yardage run. Philly is the league’s worst defense in power situations, which Football Outsiders defines as a run with 2 yards to go for a first down or a touchdown.
The Eagles have allowed 0.41 EPA per rush attempt on second-and-short, third-and-short and fourth-down carries, per NFL Next Gen Stats, the second-worst mark. Opposing offenses have also gone 4-for-4 on third-and-short rush attempts against the Eagles during this postseason, although they did stop the post-injured-quarterback 49ers on a pair of fourth-and-short runs in the NFC title game.
On the other hand, this is going to be one of the most fun third-and-long matchups you’ll ever see. The Eagles have suffocated opposing offenses this season on third down with 8 or more yards to go, allowing a league-low 6.3 QBR while posting an unreal 18.3% sack rate. Just four teams over the past 15 seasons have posted a better sack rate on third-and-long than these Eagles, who tee off when the run gets taken out of the equation.
Some defenses let quarterbacks check down on third-and-long, but the Eagles don’t even do that; their 51.8% adjusted completion percentage on third-and-8-or-more ranked No. 1. Opposing offenses converted just 17.7% of their third-and-longs against the Eagles, and the Giants and 49ers were a combined 1-for-9 in those same spots during the playoffs.
Against any other team, the Eagles would be seeing third-and-long opportunities and licking their chops. The only offense that would give them pause on third-and-long just happens to be the guys on the other side of the field. The Chiefs converted 41.7% of the time on third-and-8-plus this season, the league’s best mark by nearly 10 percentage points. Over the past 15 seasons, just one offense — the 2011 Saints — has been better on third-and-long than these Chiefs.
In the playoffs, however, the Chiefs are just 2-for-10 on third-and-long. Some of that owes to a small sample, and the fact they have faced a third-and-12 and a pair of third-and-19s. Mahomes also usually takes a league-high average of 3.74 seconds per pass on third-and-long to throw the ball, given that he’s usually scrambling around doing Mahomesian things to find an open receiver. He has been slowed by a high ankle sprain for much of these playoffs, though.
Will Mahomes’ ankle injury limit the Chiefs?
Although Mahomes scrambled for that critical first down and subsequent personal foul penalty to set up the game-winning field goal against the Bengals, it would be fair to say he was less than 100%. We saw him visibly limp after a play or two, and although he still retained some mobility within the pocket, he wasn’t as aggressive with his usual tactic of sprinting around in a circle before finding an open receiver.
There also were a couple of plays in that third-and-long set that qualified as rare misses for the league’s presumptive MVP. High ankle sprains for quarterbacks can prevent them from planting their feet with the same force they would normally use when healthy, and that can lead to erratic ball placement, typically with passes going high. Mahomes missed two throws, one to Moore and one to Valdes-Scantling, that he usually hits for first downs.
Mahomes has suffered a high ankle sprain before, back in Week 1 of the 2019 season. Reid said that 2019 ankle injury was worse than this most recent issue, although it sure didn’t seem like it at the time. He didn’t miss any time, throwing for 443 yards the next week against the Raiders, albeit without a single scramble all game.
Sunday will mark 22 days since Mahomes suffered that high ankle sprain against the Jaguars. Will he be back to 100%? Acknowledging that all high ankle sprains aren’t created equal, I went back to that 2019 injury and looked at what we saw 21 days after his initial injury, which was a Week 4 game against the Lions.
Mahomes went 24-of-42 for 315 yards and, perhaps more importantly, ran six times for 54 yards and a touchdown. While he was playing a Matt Patricia-coordinated defense that wasn’t very good and typically played heavy doses of man coverage — which lends itself to quarterback scrambles — Mahomes looked relatively healthy. If I hadn’t known he was coming into that game with a high ankle sprain, I wouldn’t have noticed any injury.
For the Eagles, a static (or more static than usual) Mahomes would be a competitive advantage. How they choose to attack him, both to start the game and as it evolves, might be the biggest decision Gannon has to make with his game plan on Sunday.
Should the Eagles blitz Mahomes?
Obviously, every team would rather get pressure on the quarterback without needing to blitz. The Bengals were able to create pressure at times in their games against the Chiefs over the past year while rushing just three players toward Mahomes, which is the dream scenario for defensive coordinators. Any defense is going to look good if it can get home with three.
The Eagles assembled one of the league’s best pass rushes, in part so they don’t need to blitz to create pressure. Gannon sent extra rushers on 22% of dropbacks during the regular season, which was just below the league average and came in as the 22nd-highest rate. The Eagles, who generated the league’s highest sack rate, don’t often use sim pressures or creepers, so when they blitzed this season, it was typically a conventional pressure.
When they did send extra pressure, though, good things tended to happen. They posted the league’s best QBR (32.5) when they sent five or more pass-rushers at the quarterback. Opposing quarterbacks averaged a league-low 4.1 yards per dropback when they blitzed, and Philly defenders picked up sacks on 11.1% of those blitzes, the league’s fourth-best rate.
When the Eagles didn’t blitz, they were still excellent on defense, but their QBR fell from first to eighth. And when that front four (or five) rushed and didn’t get home, the team was ordinary, even when compared with other defenses in the league who didn’t get pressure. Philly ranked 19th in QBR when it didn’t blitz and didn’t get home with a four-man rush. If the Eagles aren’t getting home without blitzing, they’ll need to send extra pressure.
The problem there is that Mahomes is the destroyer of blitzes. Over his five-year term as the Chiefs’ starter, he has been blitzed on 19.1% of his dropbacks, the lowest rate of any passer over that span. Defenses don’t blitz him because they’re terrified of what happens when they do, given that his 76.3 QBR against the blitz is also the league’s best over that window. A healthy Mahomes can run away from pressure and find an open receiver, and without extra help in coverage, that receiver is typically going to go a long way.
One person who is acutely aware of what Mahomes does to blitzes is Gannon, who clearly didn’t want to send extra rushers toward him when these two teams played last season. The Eagles blitzed on just 8.6% of dropbacks that day, the second-lowest blitz rate they’ve posted across Gannon’s 37 games as the defensive coordinator in Philadelphia. Mahomes, however, posted a 92.4 QBR in that contest, so it’s safe to say the game plan didn’t work.
That, though, was an Eagles team lacking Reddick and Bradberry and a Chiefs team with Hill and a healthy Mahomes. We know the Eagles are a much better defense. The Chiefs are a different sort of offense from the one we saw in 2021, but they don’t appear to be much worse for the wear without Hill. Even if Mahomes is something short of 100%, the big question for Kansas City is never really the offense. It’s whether the defense can hold up its end of the bargain, something that won’t be easy against an overwhelming Eagles offense.
Jalen Hurts and the Eagles’ offense
Let’s flip it to the other side and continue with the centerpiece of the Philadelphia offense. I’m not sure Hurts was fully 100% in the playoff wins over the Giants and 49ers, but he certainly was closer to full strength than he was during the Week 18 win over New York. He has had two weeks to rest his shoulder before the Super Bowl, so unless he aggravates the injury during the game, it seems like he should be a full go within the offense.
Hurts’ numbers over the past two games haven’t been extraordinary. He has run 20 times for 73 yards and thrown 49 passes for 275 yards, and even that required a 29-yard “catch” from DeVonta Smith on a fourth-and-3 play that should have been flagged as incomplete. Averaging fewer than 4.0 yards per rush and 6.0 yards per pass attempt isn’t going to blow anybody away, although his 73.3 QBR is still good enough for the third-best mark of the postseason.
Hurts has left some big plays on the field. He overthrew A.J. Brown for what should have been long touchdown passes in the Giants and 49ers games. Since returning from his injury, he has posted a 59.9% adjusted completion percentage, which removes throwaways and drops and adjusts for the depth of target. Before Week 18, his 73.3% adjusted completion percentage ranked second in the league, behind only Geno Smith.
Hurts’ development from one of the least accurate passers (adjusted for era) in league history as a rookie into one of its most accurate in two years has been stunning. Some of his growth has been taken for granted because we saw Josh Allen go on a similarly unexpected trajectory over his first three seasons, but this sort of stuff doesn’t typically happen in the NFL, at least not this quickly. If Hurts’ accuracy has been impacted by his shoulder injury, it would be a major step backward for the Eagles. Playing a ferocious San Francisco defense didn’t help, but two of his past three games were against the Giants, who finished the season as the fourth-worst defense by DVOA.
At the same time, Hurts has been essential to Philadelphia’s offensive success in the postseason. Although he hasn’t produced dramatic numbers, the threat of him as part of the rushing attack has slowed down opposing pass-rushers and linebackers and created big runs on the ground and easy completions in the air. The Giants had no idea whom or what to stop, while the 49ers melted down mentally and emotionally as the game went on and grew frustrated, leading to penalties and touchdowns.
Hurts is essential to Philadelphia’s option attack, which incorporates zone and man rushing concepts that each use the threat of him as a runner to freeze opposing defensive linemen. Like the Chiefs with their jet sweeps, reading the end man on the line of scrimmage or a linebacker allows the Eagles to make a defensive player wrong without actually needing to block him.
According to ESPN Stats & Information research, the Eagles have run for 318 yards on zone-read concepts during their two playoff games. (Some of the numbers folded in here include man-blocking concepts such as power and counter, where Hurts has the option to keep the ball.) No other team has run for more than 88 yards on option looks this postseason, and the only team to top the Eagles since 2012 is that year’s 49ers, who rode a rushing attack built around Colin Kaepernick to the Super Bowl. That San Francisco team played three games to Philadelphia’s two, so the Eagles should top that mark sometime in the first quarter Sunday.
Likewise, Hurts is an excellent operator within Philadelphia’s RPO game. Here, he doesn’t often have a run concept for himself built into the decision matrix, although there are times when he might take off if the opportunity arises. Instead, he is asked to make a quick decision by reading a second- or third-level defender’s location and movement and either hand off or deliver an accurate pass in stride to one of his receivers. This was one of the ways the Eagles slowed down star 49ers linebackers Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw in the NFC title game.
I don’t have numbers on Hurts’ RPO performance in the postseason, but the Eagles threw for a league-high 1,281 yards on RPOs during the regular season, more than 350 yards ahead of the second-place Falcons. Some of that owed to Philadelphia running more RPOs than any other team, but Hurts & Co. averaged 9.4 yards per attempt on RPO passes during the regular season.
The offense Hurts and Sirianni have used to infuriate opposing defenses has its roots in several others from around the NFL. Sirianni learned under former Eagles coordinator Frank Reich. The wide swath of run concepts the Eagles use, with everything from traditional power to dart to QB counter bash, are most often seen in Greg Roman’s Ravens playbook for Lamar Jackson. Some of the RPOs are directly out of the Oklahoma playbook of then-coach Lincoln Riley. I’d argue the Eagles’ offense is a more modern and multiple version, ironically, of what Chip Kelly brought to the NFL when he took over as the Philadelphia coach in 2013. Kelly might not have been a long-term success, but he opened the floodgates for teams using RPOs at the highest level, and the Eagles are doing it better than anybody.
RPOs can be a crutch for teams with middling quarterbacks, but they play into Hurts’ strengths. Riley’s quarterbacks at Oklahoma don’t necessarily have a great reputation as being strong in the pocket at the next level, as we’ve seen Baker Mayfield struggle to hold his ground with bailing prematurely, while Kyler Murray‘s size and style have lent themselves to creating off-script and outside the pocket.
Hurts, on the other hand, is downright unflappable in the pocket. He certainly can run around unblocked defenders when necessary, but he is impressive when it comes to standing in the pocket and delivering an accurate pass, even when it means taking a hit. There’s a moment in which every quarterback will bail and attempt to keep themselves healthy for the next play — as there should be — but he strikes that balance between self-preservation and operating within the pocket perfectly. His pocket presence has grown dramatically over the past two seasons, and it’s a huge plus for the Eagles.
If Hurts has the opportunity to operate within the structure and rhythm of the offense, the regular season told us it’s lights out for the opposing defense. He had the third-best QBR when operating inside the pocket (68.5). He was the second-best quarterback when opposing defenses weren’t able to get pressure, with Hurts’ 80.1 QBR trailing only that of Mahomes.
Most of any offense’s passes are going to come out between two and four seconds after the snap, and the Eagles were no exception. Just under 69% of his passes came in that 2-4 range, and his 85.2 QBR on those throws was the league’s best. Tua Tagovailoa is the only other quarterback who averaged more yards per attempt than Hurts’ 9.4 in those spots. When Hurts is in rhythm and trusts where he’s going with the football, he’s extremely difficult to stop.
When Hurts isn’t in those ideal situations? It’s a different story. Take those two-second splits. When he throws within two seconds of getting the ball, his QBR of 57.4 ranks 21st. Even worse, when he holds on to the ball and has to deliver it after more than four seconds, he collapses: He went 13-of-51 for 188 yards with two picks in those situations this season, and his 7.7 QBR ranked 30th out of 31 qualifying passers. Only Matt Ryan was worse.
That isn’t just a weird split, either. Hurts is the third-best passer inside the pocket, but he drops to 23rd in QBR when throwing outside the pocket. He ranks second when unpressured but just 17th in QBR (a figure that includes scrambles) when opposing teams pressure him.
Despite his mobility, Hurts is the second-worst quarterback on the run (traveling 8 or more miles per hour), as he averages minus-0.33 EPA per dropback, according to NFL Next Gen Stats. When he is in control, he’s one of the league’s three best quarterbacks. Everyone gets worse when they don’t get what they expect or have to create outside of the offense or on the fly, but he gets substantially worse. If the Eagles have a disappointing game on offense, it will be because he wasn’t allowed to get comfortable.
So, if Hurts is unflappable, how can the Chiefs … flap him?
Steve Spagnuolo and the Eagles of old
I already have referred to a pair of former Eagles coaches in Reid and Kelly, and it’s time to bring up a few more. Under Reid, there were two key pieces of the defensive puzzle who left after the 2008 season, and Reid’s teams never rebounded to where they had been over the remainder of his time in Philadelphia. One was Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins, whose departure left a hole the Eagles struggled to fill for years.
The other was legendary defensive coordinator Jim Johnson, whose aggressive, blitz-happy defenses remain fan favorites to this day. Johnson tragically had to leave the organization after the 2008 season to battle melanoma, which would take his life before the 2009 season. His influence still extends across the league through his assistant coaches, a group that includes current head coaches Sean McDermott and Ron Rivera.
Another one of those coaches was Steve Spagnuolo, who already had left the nest and become a defensive coordinator elsewhere. Spagnuolo joined the Eagles in 2000 and worked his way up the ranks from defensive assistant to defensive backs and linebackers coach. He left to take the coordinator job with the rival Giants in 2007 and became a household name when his defense held the previously undefeated Patriots to 14 points in Super Bowl XLII. Spagnuolo would later serve as head coach of the Rams and defensive coordinator of the Saints before making his way back to work with Reid as the coordinator in Kansas City.
Spagnuolo’s defense evolved away from Johnson’s and has continued to shift as the league has grown, but he has a well-earned reputation for pushing his chips in and dialing up something new or unexpected in the moments that matter most. It isn’t always about how many blitzers he sends but who goes or how many head after the quarterback.
When the Chiefs sent a blitz and forced an interception of Trevor Lawrence in the fourth quarter of their divisional round win over the Jags, Spagnuolo sent only five men after the quarterback. He used a version of a zone blitz in which defensive end Frank Clark dropped off the end of the line into coverage, while safety Justin Reid blitzed through the B-gap. While Jacksonville had five men in protection to block five rushers, the overload pressure meant it had two guys blocking air and nobody on Reid. Lawrence forced an ill-advised pass that was picked by rookie corner Jaylen Watson:
Expect to see a lot of blitzes in key situations against Hurts, right? Well, no. As it turns out, Spagnuolo hasn’t been quite as aggressive this season. He blitzed on 26.8% of opponent dropbacks, the 14th-highest rate in football. During the postseason, facing Joe Burrow and Lawrence, that number dropped even further to 17.6%. As recently as Kansas City’s last run to the Super Bowl, it was blitzing more than 41% of the time during the postseason.
Why have the Chiefs backed off? The most obvious reason would be their personnel in the secondary, which has turned over this season. Veach let safety Tyrann Mathieu leave in free agency, along with Charvarius Ward and Mike Hughes, two of Kansas City’s top three cornerbacks. DeAndre Baker was cut in August, while fellow corner Rashad Fenton was traded to the Falcons at midseason.
The Chiefs, who field the league’s third-youngest defense overall, have the youngest secondary. They’ve played seven defensive backs throughout this postseason and the only one over age 25 is safety Juan Thornhill. Reid, who joined in free agency from the Texans, is the only one not playing on a rookie deal.
When L’Jarius Sneed went out with a concussion early in the game against Cincinnati, the Chiefs faced one of the league’s most fearsome groups of wideouts with three rookies: Watson, Trent McDuffie and Joshua Williams. Now, while Sneed is expected to return Sunday, the Eagles will line up A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith and dare an inexperienced secondary to keep up.
How will Spagnuolo choose to cover those two star wideouts? In the game against the Bengals, he typically preferred to double Ja’Marr Chase in key situations, although it didn’t stop Chase from catching a 35-yard jump ball to extend a drive on fourth-and-6. Chase finished with 75 yards, which is below his season average. Tee Higgins saw more one-on-one coverage and went for 83 yards and a score, albeit on 11 targets.
Sneed is a major addition to the lineup. The Chiefs used him to shadow Seattle’s DK Metcalf earlier this season, although the third-year cornerback has said he won’t be shadowing Brown or Smith on Sunday. I’m going to wait and see whether that’s actually true, but either way, he’s a valuable player around the line of scrimmage as a run defender and blitzer. For the second season in a row, he filled up the stat sheet with sacks (3.5), tackles for loss (five), quarterback knockdowns (five) and solo tackles (75).
Spagnuolo loves to send Sneed after the quarterback out of the slot when there is no tight end or running back to help, trusting that Sneed will disrupt the play before the quarterback can get the ball out. Hurts is extremely cool and does a great job of finding his checkdowns and hot routes under pressure. If Sneed can steal a possession for the Chiefs with a pressure off the edge, that would be a huge victory for Kansas City.
It isn’t impossible to win the Super Bowl with a young secondary; remember that the Buccaneers fielded players on rookie deals two years ago and did just fine. The difference is those Bucs were excellent on defense during the regular season, and these Chiefs were not.
The Chiefs finished 30th in QBR allowed, which sounds bad. It’s not quite as dramatic, though, as it was in other years, because the league’s pass defenses were bunched much closer together by QBR than they are in a typical season. The gap between the league’s best pass defense and its worst by QBR was only nine points. In a typical season, the gap between worst and first is twice as large as it was this season.
Other metrics are more optimistic about Kansas City’s pass defense, albeit not while putting it in the category of being great. DVOA had the Chiefs 17th. They ranked 20th by EPA per play and 16th by success rate against the pass. They allowed the league’s seventh-fewest yards per attempt, but they were particularly bad in one area, which we’ll get to a little later.
The Chiefs also ranked fifth in sack rate and fourth in pressure rate despite blitzing less often, which hints toward the other investments they made this offseason in rebuilding up front. Veach brought back Clark and Chris Jones, signed Carlos Dunlap and used a first-round pick on George Karlaftis. Jones led the team by a wide margin with 15.5 sacks, but Karlaftis, Clark, Dunlap and Mike Danna combined for 20 more. The Chiefs aren’t the Eagles, but they have a legitimately good pass rush protecting that secondary.
Spagnuolo will do what he can to try to create ways for that pass rush to succeed. When the Chiefs played the Eagles in 2021, they were without star tackles Jordan Mailata and Lane Johnson, and Spagnuolo used twists, stunts and sim pressures to target both the backup tackles and the communication between those tackles and the guards next to them. Andre Dillard, who filled in at left tackle for Mailata, nearly cost the Eagles a drive with a pair of back-to-back pressures.
That offensive line isn’t the one we’ll see Sunday. Philadelphia might credibly claim to have the NFL’s best offensive line, anchored by a future Hall of Fame center. Jason Kelce might be playing the final game of his career, but the 35-year-old is not being carried over the finish line by his teammates. He and the players around him are a force of nature.
The Jason Kelce difference
I’m not sure there are many times you’ll watch an offensive line closely and see a single player stand out more than Kelce did in the win over the 49ers. San Francisco was down to a quarterback without a UCL throwing passes, so it would be foolish to say he was the most important player of the game, but he was simply all over the place. No other center looks or plays like him, and the “Kelceness” was turned up to 11 against San Francisco.
Kelce has been known for years for his ability to pull on run plays, which is unique for a couple of reasons. One is that most teams really don’t pull their centers on power plays as something more than a change of pace. When most teams run counter, for example, they’ll pull both guards, or a guard and a tackle, or even a guard and a tight end. They usually won’t pull the center, who has enough to do snapping the ball and anchoring in place for the players around him to get going.
Not only is Kelce more active and faster than just about any other center, but he’s doing it at age 35. Most centers are out of the league by that point, and the ones left are staying put. The Eagles use him as a puller and also use his blocking ability to help change some of the concepts they run on a snap-by-snap basis to create easier blocks at the line of scrimmage by having him swap duties with a guard. It was Kelce leading the way on Miles Sanders‘ second touchdown of the game against the 49ers.
Kelce and his fellow linemates can make big, cleat-displacing blocks, but those advantages are typically more subtle and add up as the game goes along. Getting better angles on a block or two picks up a couple of extra yards, turning what should have been second-and-6 into second-and-4. A defender takes an unexpected hit on trap and is a step slower when an opportunity opens up in front of him later in the game.
The Eagles also are perceptive enough to make adjustments to take advantage of opportunities on the ground as the game goes along. As The Athletic’s Ted Nguyen noted after the NFC Championship Game, the 49ers responded to Philadelphia’s combinations of wide receivers on one side of the field by lining up both their strong safety and nickel corner on that strong side.
In doing so, San Francisco left itself with three defenders on the weak side of the field. As SB Nation’s JP Acosta wrote, when the 49ers adapted by bringing Talanoa Hufanga into the box, the Eagles used Boston Scott as a blocker and sent Hurts on a lead draw for a huge gain. The Eagles are thoughtful and varied enough with their rushing attack to have counterpunch after counterpunch as the game goes along.
This will be something to watch Sunday. When the Eagles played the Chiefs in 2021, Kansas City lined up a number of times in a wide-nine front, named for the two nine-technique linemen playing well outside the defensive ends. The Chiefs didn’t have a single defensive lineman lining up in front of or inside either guard, which isn’t the sort of look you would expect against a team with a mobile quarterback. Spagnuolo likely was hoping to use those looks to run games with his linemen and isolate the two backup tackles in pass protection.
By the end of the game, the Eagles were happy to just run it in those situations. They scored a touchdown against that look on third-and-goal from the 7-yard line, a situation in which virtually every other team throws the ball. Philadelphia handed the ball off to Kenneth Gainwell and scored easily.
That touchdown from 2021 provided two other key components that could decide Sunday’s game. Let’s start with one of the most obvious places the Eagles should have a mismatch.
Philadelphia in the red zone
As you might suspect from a team that was great everywhere on offense, fielded a dynamic rushing attack and was aggressive going for it on fourth down, the Eagles were an excellent red zone offense this season. They converted 67.8% of their trips inside the 20-yard line into touchdowns, which trailed only the Cowboys and Chiefs. That number actually fell from 73.5% before Hurts’ injury, although they have responded by going 8-for-10 in the postseason. (An 11th drive ended with them kneeling down in the red zone against San Francisco.)
Things weren’t so great on the other side of the field. The Chiefs fielded the league’s second-worst red zone defense, allowing teams to convert 67.3% of the time. Opposing offenses completed 50% of their passes into the end zone against Kansas City, which tied them with the Bears for the worst mark in football. The Chiefs were the league’s 12th-best pass defense by EPA per play outside the red zone and dead last inside the 20; they essentially turned their average opponent into the Cowboys on offense inside the red zone. Not ideal.
At the same time, we know red zone performance isn’t sticky from year-to-year, so it stands to reason it might not be sticky from regular season to postseason, either. The Packers, who converted an NFL-record 80% of their red zone trips into touchdowns in 2020, went 5-for-9 during that postseason, which was roughly league average. The following season, even while Aaron Rodgers was winning his second consecutive MVP award, the Packers dropped from first to 19th in red zone conversion rate.
I went back to take a look. When offenses that had dominated in the red zone during the regular season face defenses that capitulated during their regular season in the playoffs, what happens? Do they continue to score at will, or does their success regress toward the mean?
It turns out to be more like the latter. Since 2001, those great red zone attacks have gone just 8-for-15 in their playoff matchups against woeful red zone defenses. They’ve scored touchdowns on 60.7% of their red zone possessions, which is better than the league average rate of 57.6% over that stretch, but not by much; the difference amounts to about one extra touchdown for every 32 trips inside the 20. In other words, it’s probably more accurate to assume the Eagles will be average in the red zone Sunday as opposed to their prior rate of play.
With the variance that is inevitable on a handful of plays in a single game, anything is on the table. The Eagles went 3-for-6 in the red zone when these two teams played in 2021, including a bizarre possession in which they kicked a field goal, took the points off the board for a penalty that didn’t give them a new set of downs, committed offensive pass interference on a touchdown and then kicked a field goal again. Hurts narrowly missed two throws that should have been touchdowns. The difference between 3-for-6 and 5-for-6 was a couple of feet.
One of the ways the Eagles have improved in the red zone from a year ago, of course, is with their new cheat code.
Nick Sirianni and the fourth-down advantage
The Athletic’s Kalyn Kahler wrote about the push sneak, which the Eagles used to generate a league-high 24.3 EPA on fourth down this season. Philly went 22-for-32 on fourth-down attempts; only the Browns converted more times (23), but on 10 additional attempts.
If you think the Eagles are going for it more than any other team, well, you’re paying attention. The difference between the Eagles and the Browns is that Sirianni is getting aggressive in relatively neutral game situations as opposed to moments in which a desperate team is attempting to convert while trailing.
When both teams have a win expectancy of at least 20% — when neither team is way ahead or behind — the Eagles have attempted to convert 33.9% of their fourth-down tries this season. That’s the most for any team over the past 15 seasons. They’re going for it on a whopping 56.7% of fourth downs after crossing the 50, which is again a recent league record.
Despite possessing Mahomes and Reid, a Chiefs team that has struggled in short yardage has not been anywhere near as aggressive on fourth down. They’ve gone for it in just 13.6% of neutral game scripts and in 25% of those scripts after crossing midfield. Kansas City was 8-for-9 in converting those situations in the regular season and converted a fourth-and-1 for a touchdown pass to Kelce against the Bengals, so it hasn’t been for a lack of success.
One of the reasons the Eagles are happy to go for it with Hurts and the Chiefs are reticent with Mahomes has to do with the playbook. As mentioned earlier, the Chiefs haven’t used Mahomes on a sneak since Week 7 of the 2019 season, when he dislocated a kneecap on an attempted sneak. Could they break out a push sneak in the biggest game of the season? They also have used sneaks with 6-foot-6 tight end Blake Bell in the past, although those aren’t exactly as subtle.
Sirianni’s confidence in his team on fourth down changes the way it can play throughout each series. I mentioned Smith’s fourth-down “catch” against the 49ers earlier. On the play that preceded it, Hurts was comfortable checking down to Dallas Goedert on third-and-10, knowing the Eagles would go for it on fourth-and-3. After Smith’s “catch,” the Eagles rushed to the line and got a play off to prevent any challenge and then scored on the following snap.
If the defense knows an offense is willing to go for it on fourth down, it can’t just play at the sticks and rally to make the tackle on third down. The defense has to play a couple of yards ahead of the sticks to try to keep the offense out of going-for-it range, and that opens up opportunities to complete passes beyond the first-down marker without needing to attempt or convert a fourth down.
Likewise, if an offense knows it has four downs in a sequence to try to convert, its playbook opens up on first and second down, since it has an “extra play” to try to score. Hurts completed eight passes traveling 30 yards or more in the air on first or second down this season, which was tied for second in the NFL behind Josh Allen‘s nine.
The pick
This will be a close game, although I will say the least relevant or meaningful part of this exhaustive preview is what you’re about to read below. Projecting how this individual game will actually go Sunday would be like doing second-by-second predictions for Plinko. Who could have expected the 49ers would lose Brock Purdy in the first quarter, or that the Bengals would commit a personal foul penalty with the game on the line?
While I don’t have a strong feeling about which team wins this game, I lean toward the Chiefs. I’m concerned about the massive decline in Hurts’ passing efficiency, something that didn’t need to come into play against the Giants and a quarterback-less 49ers team. The Eagles should be able to run the ball, but will they have as much red zone success as they had during the regular season?
Both of these defenses are weak in the places the opposing team wants to attack. The Chiefs aren’t a great run defense and don’t have great cornerbacks. The Eagles are weakest at linebacker and Mahomes can throw at their defensive backs when he’s not pressured. The Philadelphia pass rushes are inevitably going to get home, but that pressure can also help create short fields with strip sacks and takeaways. In a shootout, I’m going to feel foolish if I pick anybody besides Patrick Mahomes. Chiefs 31, Eagles 27.
Credit: Source link