Let’s not waste time with a long preamble: it’s championship Sunday in the NFL. In the AFC Championship, the No. 1 seed and AFC West champion Kansas City Chiefs will host the No. 3 seed and AFC North champion Cincinnati Bengals.
These two teams met earlier this season, as well as in the conference championship game last year. Cincinnati won those two contests, but the Chiefs are working with home-court advantage again. Before we break down the game, here’s an overview of how you can watch the game.
How to watch
Date: Sunday January 29 | Time: 6:30 p.m. ET
Location: GEHA field at Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City, Missouri)
TV: SCS | Flux: Paramount+ (click here)
Odds: Leaders -1.5, O/U 48
Featured Game | Kansas City Chiefs vs. Cincinnati Bengals
When the Bengals have the ball
The big story of the Bengals’ game against the Buffalo Bills last week was the offensive line. How would the group in front of Joe Burrow hold up when there were only three starters and they relied on Jackson Carman, Hakeem Adeniji and Max Scharping? It turned out that he held up well.
Burrow was pressured on just 31.6% of his dropouts, according to Tru Media, a rate well below average. Bengals running backs averaged 1.94 yards per carry before contact, a significant improvement from the 1.26 per carry they averaged during the regular season. Not only Buffalo’s defensive line not dominate the game; it was largely dominated. Cincinnati controlled the line of scrimmage from the jump.
Now the question is 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 have a higher caliber individual threat (Chris Jones) than any Bills brought to the table a week ago. There’s good news and bad news for the Bengals on that front. The good thing is that the two remaining starters along the offensive line (Ted Karras and Cordell Volson) are both playing inside, where Jones does his job. The problem is, Scharping also plays inside, and the Chiefs can field Jones wherever they want to generate advantageous games.
The real way the Bengals can neutralize the rush, however, is through Burrow. Against Buffalo, Burrow got the ball out in 2.57 seconds on average, according to Tru Media, a number in line with his 2.55 second average to throw all season. Only Tom Brady (2.33 seconds) has shed the ball faster this season, and only Brady has made a higher share of his throws (55.3%) within 2.5 seconds of the snap than Burrow ( 55.0%). Burrow’s superpower is his ability to quickly decide where he’s going with the ball and take it away from him when the situation calls for it, but he also has the wide-ranging playing ability that other league superstars bring to the table. .
It helps that he has arguably the best frame of arms in the league — or at least his conference — to choose from. Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins give him two No. 1 alpha receivers, each of which can both make contested grabs and create yards after the catch. Chase is nearly impossible to knock down with first tackle, and the Bengals take advantage of that fact by running the ball through screens and cruisers to him so he can attack defenders with a head of steam. In the first meeting 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. Steve Spagnuolo must come up with a different plan of attack this time around.
It will be interesting to see if the Chiefs slide L’Jarius Sneed on the outside and reinsert Trent McDuffie into the slot, having reversed those positions last week against the Jaguars. Jacksonville’s main receiving threat was Christian Kirk, so the Chiefs again moved Sneed into the slot. The main 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 try and physically play Boyd on the inside. Spagnuolo still needs to be careful to give Sneed and Jaylen Watson the proper help or else Burrow will aggressively work one-on-one clashes and trust his guys to win the ball in the air. Being able to send enough body after Burrow to build pressure while keeping enough cover to ensure they don’t get smoked on the outside will be a tricky balancing act.
The Bengals got a lot better at running the ball once they got away from how they wanted to run the ball at the start of the season. They were an under-center, out-of-area team at first, and it was extremely vanilla. They switched almost exclusively to a shotgun offense early in the year, which allowed them to get a bit more unpredictability in their rushing offense. Kansas City finished a respectable 15th in DVOA rushing defense this season, per Football Outsiders, so it’s not one of those units where you can just run the ball down your throat if you want, like it has sometimes been the case in past seasons. Joe Mixon and Samaje Perine surely have a role to play here, but the Bengals are better off doing what they do best: letting Burrow control the game by playing pocket point guard.
When the Chiefs have the ball
Well, it all comes down to one question: does Patrick Mahomes healthy enough to play like Patrick Mahomes? Honestly, I have no idea, and I think anyone (besides maybe Chiefs team doctors) who tells you they know for sure is lying.
So let’s try to figure out what we know:
- We know Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo will once again have a game plan tailored to deal with Mahomes and the Chiefs’ passing offense.
- We know the game plan will likely differ at least a bit from what we saw in Week 13, which itself was a bit different from what we saw in last year’s AFC title game. .
- We know Kansas City’s passing game comes through Travis Kelce, and the Bengals will likely try to take him by using Tre Flowers to get physical with him near the line of scrimmage. and send other cover defenders further down the field.
- We know the Chiefs redesigned their offense this past offseason to counter the kind of defenses the Bengals and other teams used against them last year, forcing players to adapt to specific roles to take their quick game, straight back game, and execution game. a different level.
- We know all of those moves have largely worked, with Mahomes leading the NFL in EPA by setback, Isiah Pacheco and Jerick McKinnon giving them their most versatile backfield in years, and the Chiefs having arguably their best offensive season since Mahomes won (his first) MVP award in 2018.
- We know that the Bengals know all these things, and the chiefs know that they know it, and that the Bengals know that the chiefs know that they know it, and so on.
If Mahomes is healthy, 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 adding a rushing score. If it weren’t for a fumble from Kelce, we could talk about this game very differently. It’s not like Mahomes has been completely shut down, after all. Kansas City scored on four of its first six drives, and one of those drives ran out of time in the first half with two runs from deep in their own territory. Thus, on five possessions, they totaled 24 points. Then Kelce fumbled, Cincy scored, Harrison Butker missed an equalizer, and the rest is Cincinnati mayor claims Burrow is Mahomes’ father, or something. (If anything, it should be Anarumo is Mahomes’ father, but I digress.)
In this game, however, the Bengals made Mahomes incredibly patient. He averaged 3.36 seconds before passing the ball, the seventh longest time to throw in his 91 career games. (Two of the six games he took longer were the AFC title game loss to Cincinnati last year and the Super Bowl loss to the Buccaneers the previous year.) Part of the reason why he managed to find success anyway was that he could maneuver into the pocket with his mobility, and he used that mobility to create big plays on the field. The quick-play stuff the Chiefs tried to add to their offense this season was largely unavailable.
His availability this week will depend on whether Anarumo decides that Mahomes’ injury means he should send pressure and have him try to move, or that he shouldn’t send pressure because Mahomes can’t move. to move. If Cincy pushes, Mahomes can pocket the defense like he did last week against the Jaguars. The Bengals have very rarely blitzed in these last two games against the Chiefs, and they’re not a blitz-heavy team anyway. It seems unlikely that Anarumo will suddenly change course on this. But if the Bengals don’t send in more 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 on the field.
I would expect Kansas City to be shotgun most of the time so Mahomes doesn’t have to move around too much to facilitate the run game or get into play-action pass concepts meaning that it should be a heavier game for McKinnon than Pacheco. McKinnon is an ace pass protector and has a little more big game juice due to his agility, but Pacheco has the ability to come down and punish the Bengals for playing with light boxes. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the Chiefs try to get their running game started early so the Bengals have to crawl and allow more down throws.
Prediction: Chiefs 23, Bengals 21
