Let’s not waste time with a long preamble: It’s Championship Sunday in the NFL. In the AFC Championship, No. 1 seed and AFC West champions Kansas City Chiefs will play host to No. 3 seed and AFC North champions Cincinnati Bengals.
These two teams met in the conference championship game earlier this season and last year. Cincinnati won both of those contests, but the Chiefs are once again operating on home field advantage. Before we break down the matchup, here’s how to watch the match.
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Date: Sunday January 29 | Time: 6:30 p.m. ET
Location: GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City, Missouri)
TV: CBS | Electricity: Paramount+ (click here)
opportunities: Chiefs -1.5, O/U 48
Featured Game | Kansas City Chiefs vs. Cincinnati Bengals
When the Bengals have the ball
Last week, the big story in the Bengals’ game against the Buffalo Bills was the offensive line. How would the group hold up ahead of Joe Burrow while three starters down and the likes of Jackson Carman, Hakeem Adeniji and Max Scharping to count on? As it turned out, it held up well.
Burrow was only pressured on 31.6% of his dropbacks, a far below average rate, according to Tru Media. The Bengals’ ball carriers averaged an impressive 1.94 yards per carry before contact, a significant improvement over the 1.26 yards per carry they averaged during the regular season. Not only did the Buffalo defensive line fail to dominate the game; it was largely dominated. Cincinnati controlled the line of scrimmage from the vault.
Now the question arises whether the offensive line can do it again. The Chiefs actually pressured opposing quarterbacks at a higher rate (35.7%) than the Bills (33.7%) during the regular season. And with Buffalo without Von Miller last week, the Chiefs also have a bigger individual threat (Chris Jones) than any of the Bills brought to the table a week ago. There is good news and bad news for the Bengals on this front. The good thing is that the two remaining starters along the offensive line (Ted Karras and Cordell Volson) both play inside where Jones does his work. The bad thing is that Scharping also plays indoors and the Chiefs can target Jones anywhere they want to generate advantageous matchups.
However, the true way the Bengals can neutralize the onslaught is through Burrow. Against Buffalo, Burrow brought the ball out in an average of 2.57 seconds, according to Tru Media, a number that squarely matches his season average of 2.55 seconds. Only Tom Brady (2.33 seconds) got rid of the ball faster this season, and only Brady made a higher proportion of his shots (55.3%) within 2.5 seconds of the snap than Burrow (55.0%). ). Burrow’s superpower is his ability to quickly decide where to go with the ball and get it out of his hands when the situation calls for it, but he also has the extended playability brought by the league’s other superstar quarterbacks.
It helps that he has arguably the best weapons roster in the league — or at least in his conference — to choose from. Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins give him two #1 alpha receivers, each of which can make both contested grabs and yards after catch. Chase is nearly impossible to bring down with the first tackle, and the Bengals take advantage of that fact, putting the ball on screens and crossers for him so he can attack defenders with steam. In the first duel between these two teams, the Chiefs too often left their inexperienced corners on an island with Chase or Higgins on the outside, and Burrow repeatedly made them pay for it. Steve Spagnuolo must come up with a different plan of attack this time.
It will be interesting to see if the Chiefs push L’Jarius Sneed back out and put Trent McDuffie back in the slot after trading those positions back to the Jaguars last week. Jacksonville’s biggest threat was Christian Kirk, so the Chiefs put Sneed back in the slot. The biggest threats to Cincinnati remain Chase and Higgins, not Tyler Boyd, so it might make sense to bring Sneed back into the perimeter and allow McDuffie to attempt to physically play Boyd indoors. However, Spagnuolo should still be careful to provide proper assistance to Sneed and Jaylen Watson, or Burrow will aggressively work the one-on-ones and trust his boys to win the ball in the air. Being able to send enough body into Burrow to create pressure while still maintaining enough cover to ensure they don’t get smoked from the outside is going to be a tricky balance.
The Bengals got much better at running the ball after moving away from the way they wanted to run the ball earlier in the season. They were a below center team early on, outside the zone, and it was extremely vanilla. They switched to almost exclusively shotgun attacks earlier this year, which allowed them to get a bit more unpredictability into their running attack. Kansas City ranked a respectable 15th in the Rush Defense DVOA that season, according to Football Outsiders. So this isn’t one of those sessions where you can just run the ball down your throat if you want, as has occasionally been the case in previous seasons. Joe Mixon and Samaje Perine certainly have their part to play here, but the Bengals do best what they do best: let Burrow control the game by playing point guard from the pocket.
When the Chiefs have the ball
Well, it all really boils down to one question: Is Patrick Mahomes healthy enough to play like Patrick Mahomes? Honestly, I have no idea, and I think anyone (except maybe the Chiefs’ team doctors) who tells you they know for sure is lying.
So let’s try to find out what we know:
- We know Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo will again have a tailored game plan to deal with Mahomes and the Chiefs’ passing attack.
- We know the schedule will likely be at least a little different from what we saw in Week 13, which is itself a little different from what we saw in last year’s AFC title game.
- We know Kansas City’s passing game flows through Travis Kelce, and the Bengals will likely try to take him away, using Tre Flowers to get him near the line of scrimmage and other coverage defenders further down send.
- We know the Chiefs overhauled their offense this past offseason to counter the type of defense the Bengals and other teams used against them last year, leading players to fit into specific roles around their quick play, their direct dropback play, and their running play take on another level.
- We know all of those moves largely worked, with Mahomes leading the NFL in the EPA by dropback, Isiah Pacheco and Jerick McKinnon giving them the most diverse backfield in years, and the Chiefs having arguably their best offensive season since Mahomes (his first) MVP award already 2018
- We know the Bengals know all these things and the Chiefs know they know and the Bengals know the Chiefs know they know and so on.
If Mahomes is sane, he should be trusted to figure things out. Even in the loss to Cincinnati earlier this season, Mahomes completed 16 of 27 passes for 223 yards (8.2 per attempt) and a touchdown while also scoring on the ground. If it weren’t for a Kelce fumble, we might be talking about this game very differently. It’s not like Mahomes has shut down completely, after all. Kansas City scored in four of their first six drives, and on one of those drives the clock was running out with two runs from deep in their own territory in the first half. With five possessions, they came up with a total of 24 points. Then Kelce fumbled, Cincy scored, Harrison Butker missed a field goal that made the game crucial, and the rest is Cincinnati’s mayor claiming Burrow is Mahome’s dad or something. (If anything, it should be Anarumo, Mahomes’ father, but I digress.)
In this game, however, the Bengals got Mahomes to be incredibly patient. He averaged 3.36 seconds before passing the ball, the seventh longest throw time in his 91 career games. (Two of the six games in which he took longer were last year’s AFC title game loss to Cincinnati and the year before the Super Bowl loss to the Buccaneers.) Part of the reason he was successful nonetheless was that he could maneuver in the pocket with his mobility, and he used that mobility to create big plays on the field. Most of the fast-playing material the Chiefs were trying to get back on their offense this season was unavailable.
Whether it’s available this week depends on Anarumo deciding that Mahomes’ injury means he should be pressuring and getting him to move, or not pressuring because Mahomes can’t move . If Cincy presses, Mahomes can carve the defense out of the bag like he did against the Jaguars last week. However, the Bengals have rarely blitzed in these last two games against the Chiefs, and they’re not a strong blitz team anyway. It seems unlikely that Anarumo will suddenly change course in this regard. But unless the Bengals send additional bodies, it’s also likely that the wall the Chiefs have built in front of Mahomes over the past two years will hold up and give him time to find the free man in the field.
I would expect Kansas City to be in the shotgun mostly so Mahomes doesn’t have to move too much to ease the run game or get into the play-action-pass concepts meaning it should be a harder game for McKinnon as Pacheco. McKinnon is an ace pass protector and has a little more big play juice due to his agility, but Pacheco has the ability to go downhill and punish the Bengals for playing with light boxes. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Chiefs tried to get their running game going early so the Bengals have to sneak up and allow more downfield throws.