Chiefs Toeing Dangerous Line With This Reliance on Mahomes

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Patrick Mahomes shrugged off losing another starting wide receiver on the season’s third snap, overcame a slow first-half and nearly guided the Chiefs to a storybook comeback.

And some of his most important yards in the second half Friday came courtesy of his legs, not his arm. While the Chiefs fell short in a 27-21 season-opening loss to the Chargers in Brazil, Mahomes finished as the team’s leading rusher with 57 yards on six carries.

The shoulder check

Donte Jackson probably expected Mahomes to simply step out of bounds, like most quarterbacks. But Mahomes looked like a hockey defenseman when he handed the Chargers’ cornerback a shoulder shiver at the end of a 15-yard run.

“More than anything,” Mahomes said after the game, “you saw even the run before, when I ran into the linebacker, sometimes you’ve got to do something to jump-start the team. I was not in the mood to be running out of bounds. I wanted to try to do something to get us going.”

It not only got them going, it got them in the end zone for the first time. Four plays after that third-and-8 conversion, and thanks to Teair Tart’s swipe at Travis Kelce, Mahomes improvised on a broken play, used a pump fake to freeze the secondary, and raced to the pylon for an 11-yard touchdown.

Mahomes scores on an 11-yard run. He had just 3 TD runs than long the last 5 seasons:
11 yds vs Bills 2024 AFC title game
15 yds vs Texans 12/21/2024
14 yds vs Titans 11/6/2022
— Josh Dubow (@JoshDubowAP) September 6, 2025

Can't live and die with legs of Mahomes

Afterward, Andy Reid said he wasn’t surprised by his quarterback’s legs, but also doesn’t want to see Mahomes finish as his team’s leading rusher (he led the Chiefs with 57 yards on Friday).

“Pat’s always going to get his runs in,” the head coach said. “That’s just how that goes. And we don’t plan for those. We’ve got to do even better in that area. We can do a better job there.

We’ll keep working on the run game and make sure we can get our yards per carry up a little bit higher with the running backs.”

Kansas City trailed the entire game, so those running backs – Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt --got only 10 carries and totaled 41 yards. Mahomes averaged 9.5 yards on six attempts.

It’s actually nothing new for Mahomes. In 2024, Pro Football Focus gave him a 91.5 rushing grade, better than Lamar Jackson (90.4) and second in the league behind MVP Josh Allen (93.6).

Mahomes has topped 5.0 yards per carry in six straight seasons (2019-24), a rare accomplishment for a starter at the position. His longest two regular-season carries, both 33-yard gains, came in 2024. He added a 34-yard scramble in the win over Buffalo during the 2021 AFC divisional playoffs.

In Friday’s loss, he had carries of 15, 11 and 10 yards. Mahomes said after the game his runs obviously weren’t enough.

“We kind of got going as an offense in the second half,” he said. “But it takes everybody. I mean, we’ve got to start faster and we’ve got to be better on both sides of the ball and special teams. So, we understand that, we’re going to be accountable to that, and we’ll come back better this next week.”

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