Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is mostly throwing to a new group of wide receivers this season, but he won’t use that as an excuse.
Not even when his team ended up on the wrong end of a 20-17 loss to the Colts on Sunday in Indianapolis.
“I don’t expect growing pains,” Mahomes said. “You obviously have new players, and you don’t know how everybody’s going to respond in tough situations. But we know we can learn from it. But for me, I‘m always going out there with the expectation that we’re going to win.”
With the free agent signings of JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling, that left Mecole Hardman as the team’s most tenured wide receiver going into this season. Still, Mahomes looked sharp through the first two games and against the Colts he completed 20 of 35 passes for 262 yards and a touchdown and one interception, which came on the Chiefs’ last possession as they were driving for a potential game-tying field goal.
The interception — Mahomes’ first of the season — was one of several miscues by the Chiefs. For starters, there was a muffed punt that led to a Colts’ touchdown, a missed extra point, a missed field goal and missed conversion on a fake field goal. There also was a critical unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on defensive lineman Chris Jones in the fourth quarter.
The Chiefs also only reached the end zone twice in four trips to the red zone.
“We got to gel altogether, and it starts with me,” Mahomes said. “There were certain throws I was putting it on guys’ back hips instead of in front of them. There were certain situations where we were barely off. It’s little things like that. Whenever you’re playing a tough game like that you have to execute at a high level, and we have to learn from it.”
Mahomes’ frustration showed at end of the first half when the Chiefs, who were ahead 14-10 at the time, chose to run out the clock instead of trying to get in field goal range. Mahomes and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy had a spirited exchange, and coach Andy Reid had to step in and take Mahomes by the arm and lead him to the locker room.
“He wanted to go for it, obviously,” Reid said of Mahomes. “Not a Hail Mary. Something else that we have in the plan, but I thought it was best not to do it. But he’s a competitive kid and wants to take advantage of every opportunity, and I thought it was best to let that ride there.”
Mahomes also downplayed the incident, saying the Chiefs needed to be better in the second half.
“I wanted to go try and score,” Mahomes said. “That’s just who I am. We were in a tough situation. I believe it was like second or third and 20 or something like that and probably the smart decision was to just take it — we got the ball out of the half — let’s just go to halftime.
“But I’m always going to be wanting to score and I pretty much just said, ‘Let me have a chance at it,’ and he was like, ‘Let’s just get back in the locker room and we’ll get something going for the next half.’ And I guess I don’t know if that’s an altercation but that was the end of the conversation.”
