What Happened to the Chiefs Passing Attack

The Chiefs passing attack was relatively anemic vs the Lions, is there any cause for concern?

The Kansas City Chiefs fell short against the Detroit Lions last Thursday and most of that blame falls at the feet of the offense. The defense held strong in the absence of Chris Jones by only allowing 14 points but due to offense struggles - including a Pick 6 - they still found themselves on the losing end of the game.

The Chiefs struggled to get anything going on the ground or through the air. The lack of run game success isn’t shocking for the Chiefs but their lack of consistency in the passing game against one of the league’s worst passing defenses just last year was. The two most obvious answers to why the team struggled are the [late] absence of Travis Kelce and an unlikely to sustained amount of drops.

The return of Kelce and a regression to the mean - or even slightly above - in drops instantly puts the offense back into “likely completely fine” territory. The real issue on the offense could lie a little deeper than just those two basic points however. That is what we’re going to look at today is how the Chiefs’ passing game performed on third downs vs the Lions.

Chiefs Passing Attack

Not Everything Was Bad

After a little bit of a sluggish start on offense, the Chiefs’ passing game began to show signs of life in the first half. Without Kelce in the game, the Chiefs planned on seeing a fair bit of man coverage and were dialing up a lot of concepts to create natural rubs or to attack leverage.

They are one of the most creative teams at using switch releases or getting into “stacked route stems” in the entire NFL. On the first play above the Chiefs use one of their common switch release concepts to get their slot WR free on a Fade route. The ball doesn’t end up going that direction - which we’ll touch on later but it appears Mahomes is reading that concept first and chooses to pull the ball down - and instead finds it’s way into the hands of McKinnon isolated on a linebacker. That’s a matchup McKinnon is going to win 9/10 times with that much space to operate.