Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is the NFL’s comeback king

There is no amount of time too short, no distance too far, nor any lead too big for Patrick Mahomes to lead a Kansas City Chiefs comeback.

With two passes, Mahomes moved the ball 44 yards down field. The Chiefs hit the field goal as time expired. Then they won in overtime. It was so improbable that even some Chiefs diehards left the stadium and turned off their televisions.

The Bills will get another crack at the Chiefs on Sunday when two of the best teams in the league square off in one of the marquee matchups of this NFL season. The showdown features the league’s two highest-scoring offences and arguably the game’s two best quarterbacks in Allen and Mahomes. Absolutely nobody will be surprised if they meet again in January with a spot in the Super Bowl on the line.

But there’s bad news for Allen and the Bills. Patrick Mahomes hasn’t stopped coming back.

This past week was yet another instance of how Mahomes could decide to spend much of a game doing crossword puzzles in the locker room and still manage to leave opponents utterly demoralised by the end of the fourth quarter. Kansas City trailed 17-0 to the Las Vegas Raiders on Monday night. The Chiefs won 30-29.

What’s staggering about these types of performances for the Chiefs is that they’re not outliers. The abnormal thing is that they’re quite normal.

Since Mahomes entered the league, he has trailed by at least seven points in 36 games, including the playoffs. He has gone on to win 24 of them, according to Stats LLC. That means he still wins 67% of the time the Chiefs spot their opponents a touchdown. No other active quarterback with at least 10 such games has even won half of them.

The numbers get sillier at an even bigger deficit. When Mahomes has trailed by at least 10 points, he has a 12-9 record. The next quarterback on that list in those situations has a far bigger sample size and a far worse track record. Tom Brady has only won 38% of his 102 career games when trailing by 10-plus points.

More than no-look passes or casually tossing the ball left-handed, this has defined the arc of Mahomes’s career. When the Chiefs won the Super Bowl after the 2019 season, they stormed back from big deficits in every single postseason game and won each of them handily.

First they were down 24-0 to the Houston Texans, when they managed to take the lead before halftime and turn the game into a 51-31 blowout win. Then they trailed by double-digits to the Tennessee Titans in the AFC Championship and once again won by double-digits. They capped that off with a Super Bowl win when they trailed the San Francisco 49ers by 10 midway through the fourth quarter yet somehow won 31-20.

It’s the product of an offence that’s more explosive than any other in football. Since Mahomes became the Chiefs’ starter in 2018, he has more passes for at least 15 yards than anyone else in the league. Instead of moving the chains methodically, Mahomes breaks them.

But if there’s any quarterback who can rival that type of quick-strike firepower these days, it might just be the one across the field from him on Sunday.

Before Mahomes’s last-second magic in last year’s playoff game, Allen threw two touchdown passes in the final two minutes. He threw two touchdowns for over 60 yards apiece last week alone. He also leads the NFL this year in passing yards from completions at least 15 yards long.

The one thing Mahomes and Allen both want is making sure the other doesn’t get the ball last.

– Wall Street Journal