Let’s not waste time with a long preamble: It’s NFL Championship Sunday. At the Asian Championships, the top seed and the West Asian Champion Kansas City Chiefs It will host the No. 3 seed and AFC North Champion Cincinnati Bengals.
These two teams met earlier this season, as well as in last year’s conference championship game. Cincinnati won both contests, but the Chiefs again ran with home field advantage. Before we break down the match, here’s a look at how to watch the match.
How do you watch
Date: Sunday 29 January | time: 6:30 p.m. ET
Location: GEHA Stadium at Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City, Missouri)
television: CBS | Stream: Paramount + (click here)
Prospect: 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 that goes into the Bengals vs Buffalo bills It was the offensive line. How will the group standing against Joe Burrow while down three starters, and counting on the likes of Jackson Carman, Hakeem Adeniji and Max Scharping, hold up? As it turns out, it held up just fine.
Boro has stress only 31.6% of its dropouts, according to Tru Media, which is well below average. The Bengals’ ball carriers averaged 1.94 yards per carry before contact, a huge improvement from the 1.26 per carry they recorded during the regular season. It wasn’t just Buffalo’s defensive line Not Dominate the game greatly controlled. Cincinnati dominated the line of scrimmage from the jump.
Now, the question becomes whether the offensive line can do it again. The Chiefs actually pressured opposing quarterbacks at a higher rate (35.7%) during the regular season than the Bills (33.7%). And given that Buffalo was without Von Miller last week, the Chiefs also face an individual threat of a higher caliber (Chris Jones) than any that was brought up 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 Fulson) both play inside, with Jones doing his thing. The bad is that Scharping also plays inside, and the Chiefs can align Jones wherever they want to create advantageous encounters.
The real way the Bengals can neutralize a rush, though, is through Burrow. Against Buffalo, Burrow got the ball in an average of 2.57 seconds, according to Tru Media, a number perfectly in line with his season average of 2.55 seconds for throwing. Only Tom Brady (2.33 seconds) has cleared the ball faster this season, and Brady has shot more wickets on his throws (55.3%) within 2.5 seconds of the shot than Burrow (55.0%). Burrow’s super strength lies in 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 play ability that other quarterbacks in the league bring to the table. .
It helps that he has the best cadre of guns in the league – or at least in his conference – to choose from. Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins give him two alpha receivers No. 1, each of whom can make contested runs and create yards after catch. Chase is nearly impossible to bring down with a first forward, and the Bengals take advantage of this fact by getting him the ball on screens and crossbars so he can attack defenders with a powerful header. In the first game between those two teams, the Chiefs often left their inexperienced corners on an island with Chase or Higgins on the outside, and Boro made them pay for it over and over again. Steve Spagnolo should come up with a different attacking plan this time around.
It will be interesting to see if the Chiefs move L’Jarius Sneed out and reinsert Trent McDuffie into the slot, after they switched positions again last week against Jaguar. Christian Kirk was the biggest threat received in Jacksonville, so Chief moved Snead into the slot again. The main threats to Cincinnati remain Chase and Higgins, not Tyler Boyd, so it might make sense to bring Snead back to the perimeter and let McDuffie try to play the physical against Boyd on the inside. Spagnuolo must remain keen to provide appropriate assists to Sneed and Jaylen Watson, or Burrow will work aggressively in individual matches and trust his teammates to win the ball in the air. Being able to send enough bodies past Burrow to generate pressure while also keeping enough in cover to ensure they don’t smoke outside will be a tricky balance.
The Bengals got a lot better at running the ball once they moved away from how they wanted to run the ball at the start of the season. They were an under center and out of the zone team early on, and it was very vanilla. They transitioned to the shotgun offense almost exclusively early in the year, which allowed them to have a bit more unpredictability in their rushing offense. Kansas City finished a respectable 15th in DVOA rushing defense this season, according to Football Outsiders, so this isn’t one of those units where you can just run the ball down their throats if you want to, as has sometimes been the case in seasons past. Joe Mixon and Samaje Perine certainly play a role here, but the Bengals better do what they do best: let Burrow control the game by playing point guard out of the pocket.
When the chiefs have the ball
Well, it all really comes down to one question: Is Patrick Mahomes Healthy enough to play as Patrick Mahomes? Honestly, I have no idea, and I think anyone (except the Chiefs’ team doctors) who tells you they know with any degree of certainty is a liar.
So, let’s try to find out what we know:
- We know Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo will once again have a game plan dedicated to handling Mahomes’ offense and the leader’s passing.
- We know the game plan will likely differ at least a little bit from what we saw in Week 13, which itself was a little bit different from what we saw in the AFC title game last year.
- We know Kansas City’s passing game is flowing through Travis Kelsey, and the Bengals will likely try to take him far with Tre Flowers to interact with him near the line of scrimmage. And Sending other defenders to cover his way down the field.
- We know that the Chiefs redesigned their offense in the offseason to counter the kind of defenses the Bengals and other teams used against them last year, and had players fit into specific roles to perform their fast game, direct play, and run the game to a different level.
- We know all of these moves have largely worked, Mahomes has led the NFL in EPA per touchdown, Isiah Pacheco and Jerick McKinnon have given them their most versatile backfields in years, and the Chiefs have arguably their best offensive season since Mahomes won (For the first time) MVP award back in 2018.
- We know that the Bengalis know all these things, that the chiefs know that they know that, that the Bengalis know that the chiefs know that they know that and so on.
If Mahomes is healthy, he should be trusted to figure things out. Even in a loss against Cincinnati earlier in the season, Mahomes completed 16 of 27 passes for 223 yards (8.2 per attempt) and a touchdown, while adding a score on the ground. If not for Kelsey’s stumble, we might be talking about that game a lot differently. It’s not like Mahomes totally shut down, after all. Kansas City scored on four of their first six drives, and one such drive was running out the clock in the first half with two drives deep in their own territory. So, over five possessions, they totaled 24 points. Then Kelsey fumbles, Sensei scores, Harrison Butker misses a game-tying field goal, and the rest is up. The mayor of Cincinnati claims Boro is Mahomes’ father, or something. (If anything, Anarumo should be Mahomes’ father, but I digress.)
In that game, however, the Bengals made Mahomes incredibly patient. It took an average of 3.36 seconds before he passed the ball, the seventh longest time he’d thrown in his 91-game career. (Two of the six games he took longer were losing the AFC title game to Cincinnati last year, and losing the Super Bowl to hacker The year before.) Part of the reason he was able to hit it anyway is because he can maneuver into the pocket with his movement, and he used that mobility to create big plays on the court. The quick in-game stuff the Chiefs have tried to add back into their offense this season has been largely lacking.
Whether he’s available this week will depend on whether Anarumu decides Mahomes’ injury means he should pressure him and make him try to move, or that he shouldn’t pressure because Mahomes can’t move. If Cincy presses, Mahomes can carve out defense from the pocket, as he did last week against the Jaguars. The Bengals have rarely rocked in the last two games against the Chiefs, and they aren’t a heavy offensive team anyway. It seems unlikely that Anarumu would suddenly reverse course on this matter. But if the Bengals don’t send in extra bodies, it’s also possible that the wall the two chiefs have built in front of Mahomes over the past two years will hold and give him time to find the free man on the field.
I expect Kansas City to be on the shotgun more often so Mahomes doesn’t have to move around so much to smooth out a running game or get into the notions of a pass play, which means it has to be a heavier game. Mackinnon from Pacheco. McKinnon is an ace pass guard and has a bit more juice due to his agility, but Pacheco has the ability to stoop and punish the Bengals for playing with the light boxes. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the Chiefs try to start their game early so the Bengals would have to sneak around and allow more pitches.