The Secret Behind the Raiders-Busting Trick Play Finally Comes to Light as Mahomes Names the Mastermind.QQ
The Kansas City Chiefs got the Las Vegas Raiders on a fourth-down play in Week 7 with some unique trickery, and they’ve got their offensive coordinator to thank for it.
At the onset of the second quarter near midfield, the Chiefs ran a play on fourth-and-1 that you don’t often see in the NFL. It wasn’t like the typical trick play you’ll see from Kansas City, like a defensive tackle throwing a pass or a play featuring some unique formation or motion.
What made this play unique was the acting that happened ahead of the snap. Even Tony Romo expected the typical attempt from Mahomes to draw the Raiders offside with his cadence and the hard count before taking a penalty and punting the ball away. Then something unexpected and explicit happened.
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“This (expletive) never (expletive) works, man,” Mahomes says at the line of scrimmage.
The momentary frustration from Mahomes didn’t just catch Romo off guard, but it caught the Raiders off guard, too. When the Chiefs surprisingly snapped the ball and handed it off to Kareem Hunt, Las Vegas wasn’t ready, and he picked up the first down with ease.
Speaking to reporters after the game, Mahomes explained how exactly this play came to be, giving offensive coordinator Matt Nagy credit for it.
“I think it comes from all my State Farm commercials,” Mahomes joked. “(Matt Nagy) actually came up with the idea. We had talked about doing the hard count, trying to draw the teams offside. I can’t remember who I watched do it a couple of years ago, and they had said that. And so I was like, ‘I’m going to use that as part of my acting to, like, try to get the defense just to relax a little bit.’ But at the end of the day, we just got to go get it. I thought the offensive line did a great job of driving off the ball, and then Kareem (Hunt) in those situations is money.”
That play and the credit is a pretty big win for Nagy, whose name has come up in the early head-coaching rumors with the Tennessee Titans now having a vacancy after firing Brian Callahan. It’s an ever bigger win for the Chiefs, who now have a whole new layer to their hard count.
The Chiefs have plenty more trickery to unleash upon the league
Asked about the frequency and lengths the team goes to practice such plays, Mahomes declined to go too far down the rabbit hole. He did, however, express that this is something they practice and that they make sure everyone is on the same page. The last thing they want to do is accidentally trick themselves on a play such as that.
“I don’t want to get too far in the weeds,” Mahomes said. “There’s a kind of stuff that we do, so we know everybody’s on the same page, and we know when we’re acting, when we’re not acting, and all of the different type of stuff. We have plays off of it. I mean, that’s just kind of what you have to do in order to be a step ahead in this league.”
The fact that they executed this play successfully now opens up a whole new dimension of trickery. It will have teams honing in on his cadence, which could make the hard count that much more effective against opponents moving forward.
Travis Kelce assesses Patrick Mahomes’ acting ability
Chiefs TE Travis Kelce, who was in the latest “Happy Gilmore” movie and hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” was asked to judge Mahomes’ acting ability after the game. Needless to say, he gave his teammate a 10-out-of-10.
