This week’s amateur adventures in film has me looking at another offence (I know, what has happen to me?) as I was just too tempted by the matchup of the Kansas City Chiefs high flying offence going against the Jaguars vaunted defence.

Having looked at Matt Nagy’s offence last week, you can see the relation to what Andy Reid is doing as they share the extensive use of Jet Sweep motion, i.e a receiver coming in motions and either being given the ball or a handoff is faked. This is particularly effective for the Chiefs given Tyreek Hill’s speed as he is often the motion man but Sammy Watkins also runs several plays. The Chiefs use a lot of motion anyway, mainly utilising a mixture of 11 and 12 personnel, although Travis Kelce may be listed as a tight-end but he plays more like a difficult to match up to receiver.

The Chiefs like a lot of the best offences run groupings routes designed to challenge the defence at multiple levels rather than relying on a receiver winning their matchup, but they faced an interesting problem against the Jaguars formidable defence. It was a strange game in that the Chiefs won convincingly and with a score line of 30-14 it looks fairly straight forward and yet the offence didn’t have things their own way. The running game was contained for most of the time and may have finished with one-hundred and twenty-six yards off thirty carries, giving an average of 4.2 yards per carry, but if you remove Kareem Hunt’s long run of 24 yards that average drops to 3.5. However, this commitment and number of carries established balance and that is one of the things that I think is key in running a successful offence. I think the days of establishing the run our long gone, but I think it is important to challenge the defence by having a credible threat of using both run and pass plays and play-action is very definitely a quarterback’s friend.

Speaking of which, this wasn’t exactly a bad game for Patrick Mahomes but it was one where he threw two interceptions and didn’t have a touchdown pass even if he did gain over three hundred yards. There were one or two balls where the receivers were covered yet he threw it anyway. I also don’t remember seeing the Jaguars’ defence run as much zone coverage as they did in this game before, with them sometimes playing cover three. One of the nice pickups that the Chiefs had was on one of the rare occasions where the Jaguars sent an extra linebacker to rush the passer and Mahomes was able to find Travis Kelce in a soft part of the zone before the safety could get up to him and Kelce was able to wrong foot the would be tackler and get a nice pickup before he was finally stopped.

This was the big thing in this game, the cat and mouse between offence and defence and it produced a really interesting competition between these two units. It was inevitable that Mahomes would not be able to maintain his stellar opening to the season in all games but he still made good plays and there were almost casual throws that were right on the money. However, there were also interceptions where he trusted his arm to make the play and was wrong, although the Jaguars defence will do that to many a quarterback. Still, the Chiefs won comfortably despite his turnovers thanks to those of Blake Bortles and the Chiefs’ offence moved the ball effectively even if they had more trouble than usual in this particular game. I shall resist making any big proclamations, but it was definitely fun tape to go through. It may be time to get back to a defensive player or unit though, given my focus on offence and quarterbacks so far this year. I don’t know what has come over me…