If the Kansas City Chiefs want their three-peat, they’re going to have to beat the best team they’ve played in a Super Bowl in the Patrick Mahomes era. The Philadelphia Eagles have lost three games all season, two of them after their receivers dropped passes that would have clinched victories. Since their Week 5 bye, the Eagles have gone 15-1, posted a plus-27 turnover margin and won their games by an average of 13.8 points.

This Eagles team is better than the one the Chiefs beat two years ago in Super Bowl LVII and better than either of the San Francisco 49ers teams Kansas City topped in Super Bowls LIV and LVIII. Philadelphia is even scarier than the Tom Brady-led Tampa Bay Buccaneers that managed to give Mahomes his only championship game defeat in Super Bowl LV.

I wouldn’t say this is the best Chiefs team we’ve seen, but it might be the wiliest. Rarely dominant but never out of it, the Chiefs put together a series of spectacularly close victories. Holding on to a victory against the Baltimore Ravens in Week 1 by the length of Isaiah Likely‘s toenail portended what was to come all season. The Chiefs won games with fourth-down stops, field goals bouncing off uprights, kicks getting blocked, and snaps being dropped. They found a way to sprinkle just enough magic dust into each victory. Their win over the Buffalo Bills in the AFC Championship Game, a measure of revenge for Buffalo costing the Chiefs a chance at an undefeated regular season in November, was their 15th consecutive victory in games decided by seven points or fewer.

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The Eagles want their own revenge. If the team from two years ago knew it would get a 304-yard passing day with four touchdowns from Jalen Hurts, it would have liked its chances. Instead, the league’s most fearsome pass rush failed to sack Mahomes, the Chiefs went 4-for-5 in the red zone and the Eagles were denied their second title in six seasons.

Can they deny the Chiefs from making history? A 2024 offseason for the ages has replenished the Eagles’ roster, and they’re the better team — on paper. That starts with the player who might be the story of the season, a running back Kansas City has to stop if it has any hope of winning another title:

Jump to a section:
What Saquon Barkley has brought to Philly
The new (and improved) Jalen Hurts
Will the Chiefs send the house?
The battle of elite defensive tackles
Where will the Chiefs line up Joe Thuney?
The play keeping the Eagles up at night
How both teams will play spy games on the QB
Vic Fangio’s rough streak vs. Andy Reid
Do the Eagles have (or need) a Kelce stopper?
The Eagles are really good … but also lucky
Do both teams have special teams concerns?
Chiefs-Eagles final score prediction

The Saquon Barkley effect

One of the biggest differences between the Eagles team that came up short against the Chiefs two years ago and the one that will attempt to win the Super Bowl is what it has at running back. In 2022, they got solid work out of Miles Sanders and Boston Scott during the regular season, but most of their rushing success in the Super Bowl came from Jalen Hurts. Three Philadelphia halfbacks combined to carry the ball 17 times for 45 yards and two first downs in that game, generating minus-27 rushing yards over expectation (RYOE) in the process.

Their new lead running back seems to average 45 yards per carry at times. Barkley is in the middle of what might go down as the best season ever produced by an NFL running back. He’s 30 yards away from breaking Terrell Davis‘ single-season record for combined rushing yards in the regular season and playoffs (2,476) while having carried the ball 59 fewer times than the legendary Broncos back did during that 1998 campaign.

We don’t have RYOE numbers for Davis’ era, but Barkley generated 549 RYOE during the regular season and has 172 more during the postseason. That latter figure would have been the 10th-highest mark for any back during the regular season. Barkley has done that in three games, and that’s with a reduced workload in the conference title game against the Commanders as he battled a calf injury. All he did that game was score three touchdowns and come up with a series of key blocks for Hurts.

The scores against the Commanders summed up the differences between Barkley and the less spectacular backs who graced the Eagles’ backfield over the past decade. The hole on the 60-yard touchdown that opened up the game was initially sprung when Commanders lineman Dante Fowler Jr. tried to spin away from a block attempt and both fell over and tripped up linebacker Bobby Wagner in the process, but there were still two Commanders defensive backs in position to slow down Barkley. He ran through both of their tackle attempts and then accelerated away from another would-be tackler for the score. For Sanders, that’s probably a 15-yard gain. It was 60 and a touchdown for Barkley.

Both of his other scores came in short-yardage situations on plays that were seemingly designed to land inside, only for him to cut them outside into open space for a score. He has benefited from playing behind a great offensive line, but his ability to set up defenders before breaking them down and getting outside to torch them with his acceleration has created so many big runs this season. It feels like a miracle for the defense any time he ends up one-on-one against a defender at the second or third level and doesn’t turn that opportunity into a touchdown.

Barkley has 13 runs of at least 30 yards this season, and they’ve come on all kinds of concepts. The long touchdown against the Commanders came on a crack toss, where A.J. Brown blocked down against Fowler and the Eagles got left tackle Jordan Mailata and tight end Dallas Goedert out into the alley against smaller defensive backs. They love these pin-and-pull run concepts, where they can take advantage of the athleticism of their offensive linemen and tight ends in open space.

There’s the pin-and-pull run game, sure. But Barkley has produced long runs on outside zone. And inside zone. And split zone. And counter. And an iso run. The Eagles are capable of running both zone and gap schemes at a high level, and Barkley excels both within those concepts and in the open field. And all of that comes without considering the impact Hurts has, both as a runner and in creating doubt as a potential ball carrier for opposing defenders on plays in which Barkley gets the ball.

Even beyond Barkley’s innate ability, the diversity of run schemes and potential ball carriers makes the Philadelphia run game extremely difficult to stop. It’s a quintessential 2024 rush attack. Go back six years ago to Super Bowl LIII between the Patriots and Rams. While the Rams came into the game with one of the league’s best rushing attacks, their scheme was almost entirely built around zone-running concepts from the Mike Shanahan/Alex Gibbs tree.

The Patriots, with some help from Vic Fangio, found a way to suffocate those zone runs. Following the lead of the then-Bears defensive coordinator and what he did to hold the Rams to six points in a December victory, the Pats played a 6-1 front on early downs, with six players on the line of scrimmage to prevent the Rams from getting any double-teams on defenders and a linebacker to clean up and make tackles against the running back. The Rams mustered only 62 yards on 18 carries, and the inability to run out with their core zone concepts both got the offense off schedule and took away the bones of the play-action game that helped fuel quarterback Jared Goff‘s success. Sean McVay is a genius, but he wasn’t able to find a counterpunch to get the offense going, and it eventually led the Rams to totally reenvision their offensive architecture and move toward more gap schemes in 2023 and beyond.

Because the Philly run game is diverse and their offensive line is so impressive, there’s no single schematic solution capable of taking away Barkley and the rushing attack like there was for the Patriots six years ago. The Chiefs have to be gap-sound, have to win as many one-on-one battles as possible and have to tackle Barkley in confined quarters before he can get into the open field.

The Chiefs prioritize tackling from their linebackers and defensive backs, and they’re generally good at preventing opposing teams from generating big plays on the ground. They allowed only one run of 30 or more yards during the regular season, and that came on a second-and-23 draw by Jerome Ford with a lopsided lead over the Browns. The Bills’ James Cook added a second big run in the postseason when he went for 33 yards in the AFC Championship Game.

In both cases, it was backup defensive backs who failed to make a play. Against Ford, rookie defensive back Christian Roland-Wallace took a subpar angle in pursuit, allowing the Browns back to accelerate past him down the sideline. And in the playoffs, Cook cut his duo run play to the sideline where he ran through the tackle attempt of cornerback Nazeeh Johnson.

Those young defensive backs have to be considered a vulnerability for the Eagles to exploit. With Jaylen Watson sidelined by a fractured ankle for most of the season, teams picked on Johnson, who was then removed from the starting lineup for Joshua Williams, who also struggled. Watson is back and safety Bryan Cook is expected to return after leaving the Bills game with a quad injury, but Johnson is playing as Kansas City’s third cornerback. Safety Chamarri Conner has allowed a passer rating north of 100 in coverage this season. For all the talent the Chiefs have on defense, it takes only one mistake, one missed tackle, one incorrect run fit or one blown assignment to spring Barkley.

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The new (and improved) Jalen Hurts

While Hurts split his matchups in 2022 and 2023 against the Chiefs, the team’s success and Hurts’ performance in those games were not aligned. He was more solid than spectacular in the 2023 regular-season victory, but he was by far the best player on the field in the Eagles’ Super Bowl LVII loss. He threw for 304 yards, ran for 70 more and racked up four touchdowns. A clumsy fumble that the Chiefs returned for a touchdown was the only blemish.

The way the Chiefs slowed down Hurts was through the blitz. He went 11-of-15 against pressure packages, but those throws went for only 91 yards. He averaged 6.1 yards per attempt against the blitz and 9.3 yards per throw against three- or four-man rushes. Kansas City also pressured Hurts on 40% of those blitzes, a rate which dropped below 26% when not sending extra players at him.

Between 2022 and 2023, the book on Hurts became clear: Blitz him early and often. Even amid an MVP-caliber season in 2022, he was an entirely different quarterback against extra pass rushers. While he ranked fourth in the league in QBR when opposing teams didn’t blitz, he fell to 15th when teams turned up the heat. The word was out by the second half of last season, as Hurts was blitzed at the eighth-highest rate of any quarterback.

Sometimes, those splits can be a product of randomness. What showed up in the numbers for Hurts, though, was verified by the tape. The Eagles didn’t seem to have many answers when teams sent pressure. Nick Sirianni and former offensive coordinators Shane Steichen and Brian Johnson trusted their offensive line to pick up rushers and Hurts to beat unblocked defenders with his legs. With A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, Hurts had receivers who could win on 50-50 balls, but he didn’t have pass catchers making adjustments to blitzes and pressures, something that is expected in most NFL offenses.

When Philadelphia moved on from Johnson and replaced him with Kellen Moore last offseason, one of Moore’s key projects was addressing these issues. Well, by the numbers, the blitz isn’t a weakness anymore. During the regular season, Hurts’ 94.5 QBR against the blitz was the best mark in football. He averaged 8.5 yards per attempt, throwing 10 touchdown passes with just one interception. That lone pick came in a desperate situation late in the Week 2 loss to the Falcons. He has gone four months without throwing an interception against the blitz. That’s a victory for Hurts and Moore.

Looking more closely, though, there hasn’t been a dramatic schematic shift in Philly’s offense. I went back and watched every Hurts snap against the blitz from the second half of the season and into the postseason. There were certainly signs of progress and growth, but I’m not sure this offense is loaded with easy answers in terms of slight adjustments or hot routes on a snap-to-snap basis.

While acknowledging I can’t know what an offense is asking its receivers to do on every single play, there were still too many moments when Hurts got to the end of his drop on third down against a blitz and no receiver was even looking up for the ball. There were times in which it looked like a receiver ran into a throwing lane vacated by a blitz, but Hurts wasn’t looking in his direction. There were certainly moments where it looked like Hurts and his receivers were on the same page about adjustments and those led to easy completions, but it wasn’t a routine occurrence.

Then, during the playoffs, there have been multiple broken plays and/or protection mixups that led to wasted snaps against the blitz. It’s fair to chalk some of those concerns up to the snow in the Rams game and the injuries to the interior offensive line in the Commanders matchup, but Hurts’ numbers against the blitz have fallen. Over the past three games, he has gone 17-of-27 for 211 yards and a lone score against the blitz, producing a 57.2 QBR.

So, if there wasn’t a huge schematic shift, what explains Hurts’ improvement against the blitz? Here are five reasons:

1. He stopped throwing interceptions. Between 2022 and 2023, Hurts threw 10 picks on 328 pass attempts against the blitz, an interception rate of 3%. In 2024, that fell to one pick in 107 attempts, down to 0.9%. Some of that is randomness — a couple of picks were the result of drops by receivers and another bounced around like a pinball for a pick-six — but it’s clear Moore has encouraged Hurts to avoid putting the ball in danger. One of the few ways his performance against the blitz has declined has been through his sack rate, which has jumped from 7.2% in both 2022 and 2023 to 9.8% in 2024. Sacks are bad, yes, but interceptions are worse.

2. He has changed the way he scrambles against pressure. Take a look at the chart below. The first image is where Hurts went against the blitz as a scrambler in 2022 and 2023, and where he went under Moore in 2024:

Jalen Hurts scrambles vs. the blitz
2022/23 season | 2024 season pic.twitter.com/GF8AtdMZFW

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) January 31, 2025

You’ll notice how infrequently Hurts bailed to the right, something which became an actionable habit for opposing defenses and a place for him to make mistakes. Hurts is actually scrambling more often against the blitz, with his scramble rate jumping from 7% to 11% this season, but he isn’t always great at transitioning from passer to scrambler and back.

While Hurts was tied for first in the league in QBR on throws from inside the pocket this season (alongside Lamar Jackson), his 20.0 QBR on throws outside the pocket ranked 29th. He has thrown only 19 passes on the run against the blitz in 2024, down from 70 between 2022 and 2023. Getting him to stay within the pocket or scramble forward is keeping him out of situations where he struggles and into spots where he typically thrives.

3. He has been way more accurate. Hurts’ improvement as a passer since his uneven rookie season in 2020 has been remarkable and nearly unprecedented. Josh Allen is the only other recent quarterback to make similar strides in terms of accuracy and consistency after entering the NFL. Hurts jumping from a 52% completion percentage rate as a rookie to a 68.7% mark in 2024 is a massive leap, especially while simultaneously improving his yards per attempt. It would be a bigger story if Allen didn’t make the same sort of stratospheric improvement.

While Hurts posted elite completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) marks, his minus-0.4% CPOE against the blitz wasn’t moving the needle. This season, though, he has posted a plus-8.6% CPOE, generating nearly 10 extra completions across 112 pass attempts. His precision rate, which measures how often a quarterback hits a receiver in stride in the torso area, jumped from 14th in the league between 2022 and 2023 to third this season.

Hurts’ expected completion rate against the blitz in 2024 (57.5%) is actually lower than it was in 2022 and 2023 (60.6%), which doesn’t align with the idea Moore’s scheme has created easier completions. Hurts has just done a better job of completing the passes he has attempted.

4. His throws are generating more yards after catch. Moore has worked in more quick tempo alongside the RPOs both he and Hurts have succeeded with in the pros. The Eagles have used concepts like “spacing” and asked Hurts to hit more speed outs to his receivers. His average pass against the blitz is traveling 6.9 yards in the air, down a full yard from where it was in 2022 and 2023.

In total, though, Hurts is gaining 8.0 yards per pass attempt against the blitz, which is up a full yard from where it was the previous two seasons. That means the difference is coming after the catch. Philadelphia’s receivers are averaging just under an additional yard after catch (YAC) per reception, which is enough to jump from 15th to ninth in average YAC against the blitz.

Some of the credit needs to go to Barkley, whose now-legendary reverse hurdle came while racking up extra yards as a receiver. The star back did most of the work against the blitz on a 43-yard catch-and-run against the Commanders, with the Eagles running a four verticals concept and having Barkley as a checkdown. Blitzing means more open space and more one-on-one opportunities when the ball gets out, and Barkley has shredded defenders in those moments this season.

5. The Eagles have run into (or scared teams out of) the blitz. The fifth argument isn’t anything new for this offense, but it improved in 2024. Because the Eagles are so comfortable going for fourth-and-2 or less with the tush push, their entire offensive calculus changes. Third-and-medium is a passing down for most teams. They are comfortable running the ball in that situation. In the Super Bowl against the Chiefs, they dialed up runs on third-and-3, third-and-5 and even third-and-7. Sirianni trusted Hurts to pick up a fourth-and-5 with his legs in the first half, and that turned into a 28-yard gain to set up a touchdown.

The threat of the run on third-and-medium changes the way teams need to play defense in those spots. If a defensive coordinator is confident an offense will throw, he can put six or seven defensive backs on the field, dial up exotic pressures and let his edge rushers get after the quarterback.

If defenses don’t honor the run threat, the Eagles will make them pay. Go back to the third-and-4 against the Rams I highlighted a few weeks ago. The Rams put six defensive backs on the field and lined up three undersized linebackers and defensive backs against Cam Jurgens, Landon Dickerson and Lane Johnson, each of whom outweighed the player they were blocking by an average of over 100 pounds. Hurts checked to an inside zone run behind that collective physical mismatch, and Barkley beat a safety in the open field for a 62-yard touchdown.

The range of potential calls defensive coordinators have to account for inherently impacts what they can call to try to stop those plays. Think about that fourth-and-5 the Chiefs faced against the Bills in the AFC title game, where coordinator Steve Spagnuolo dialed up a corner blitz from Trent McDuffie and blew up Buffalo’s season with two free rushers on Josh Allen.

Fourth-and-5 is a passing down for the Bills, although Allen is a threat to convert with his legs. Let’s say the Bills had gained seven yards on the prior play and faced a fourth-and-3. It’s hardly out of the question they dial up a designed run for Allen, which changes the defenders Spagnuolo puts on the field and the blitzes he can call as a result. Remember that he didn’t blitz the Bills on a fourth-and-2 in the regular season, and when Buffalo offensive coordinator Joe Brady called the same mesh concept on offense, Allen scrambled to the house for a game-winning touchdown.

That math impacts how both Spagnuolo and Moore will face this game. Knowing that the Eagles can run on third-and-medium to set up a fourth-and-short tush push, should Spagnuolo get more aggressive blitzing on second-and-long? Can Hurts make Kansas City pay with a big play against the blitz, like the 31-yard throw to A.J. Brown on fourth-and-5 in the NFC Championship Game? This was an advantage for the Chiefs two years ago, but it’s something closer to a strength-on-strength battle now.

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Will Spags send the house?

The ultimate risk-reward gambit for Spagnuolo and his pressures is to all-out blitz. The Chiefs play Cover 0 (no deep safety help and one defender in coverage for every eligible receiver, with everyone else blitzing the quarterback) on 7.8% of opposing dropbacks. The Raiders were the only team that played Cover 0 more this season. A year ago, with cornerback L’Jarius Sneed in the mix, the Chiefs played Cover 0 11% of the time in the playoffs. That was more than double the league average.

Of course, if I were drawing up the sort of offensive playmakers who would scare a defensive coordinator away from calling Cover 0, I would … basically have the Eagles. In a defensive look in which one missed tackle can mean a touchdown, Barkley has been unstoppable in the open field all season. He can run through entire teams if given the opportunity and is a mismatch against any defender in any sort of space.

It’s not just Barkley. Hurts is more of a threat on designed runs than he is as a scrambler, yet he still averaged 10 yards per scramble this season. Brown is capable of either running past or through cover corners. Smith is a threat to run away from coverage and make spectacular catches. And while opposing coaches would probably be relieved if Philadelphia targeted Dallas Goedert instead, Goedert already has a touchdown this postseason against Cover 0 when he manhandled Packers cornerback Carrington Valentine in the wild-card round.

Another way to attack blitz-happy approaches such as Spagnuolo’s is to rely on screens. The Eagles aren’t usually a screen-heavy team, but that has changed during the postseason. Hurts & Co. dialed up a league-low 32 screen passes during the regular season, but they’ve already gone to screens 12 times in three playoff games. Some of those are RPOs in which Hurts throws a tunnel or bubble screen if he has the numbers to do so, but with Barkley and their offensive line, the Eagles should be a menace on slip screens. Catching the Chiefs in a blitz with the right screen call could be another way to generate an explosive play.

Even beyond the potential of an all-out blitz, Kansas City will challenge Brown and Smith on the line of scrimmage throughout the game. Per NFL Next Gen Stats, the Chiefs play press coverage on the outside on 51.5% of opposing dropbacks, which is the most frequent rate in the league and double the league average. When these two teams played in the Super Bowl, Spagnuolo pressed on the outside 52.1% of the time. He has stayed aggressive without Sneed, but will he be comfortable keeping that rate up without his best cover cornerback from 2022 and 2023?

Spagnuolo could try to lock up one receiver with McDuffie and work accordingly, but I expect him to try something different on obvious passing downs. Given that so much of the Philadelphia passing attack funnels through Brown and Smith, I’d expect to see Spagnuolo dial up some double-bracket looks, where the Chiefs double-cover Brown and Smith with an underneath defender and help over the top. Goedert can still win one-on-one — and there’s always the concern that this leads to more targets for Barkley — but there are going to be snaps and situations in which Kansas City will prefer to try to take away Hurts’ top two targets.

One of the ways to counteract those sorts of bracket looks and create confusion on defense is to use motion. You might remember the Chiefs essentially swinging Super Bowl LVII over the Eagles with two touchdowns on what would go down in lore as “Corndog.” Twice, they feigned jet motion across the formation, forcing the Eagles to shift their coverage. And twice, the receiver in question simply stopped, turned back around in the direction from whence he came, and walked in for the easiest touchdown reception of their careers. That’s how to win a Super Bowl with Kadarius Toney and Skyy Moore at wide receiver.

The Eagles, on the other hand, are mostly going to line up and try to beat the Chiefs with better players. They used motion on 46.6% of their snaps this season, the sixth-lowest rate of any team. That’s actually way up from where they were a year ago, when their 25.7% motion rate was the lowest by a considerable margin. The league as a whole jumped from using motion about 50% of the time in 2023 to 57% of the time in 2024.

The Chiefs will hope the Eagles stay put. Kansas City ranked eighth in EPA per play against static pre-snap offenses during the regular season, but that dropped to 22nd against pre-snap motion. While Philadelphia has boosted its pre-snap motion rate ever so slightly during the postseason, its 50.5% rate is still below the league average. Reid’s offense, unsurprisingly, is using motion at a league-high 78.8% clip during the playoffs.

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The battle of elite defensive tackles

For all the time people will spend talking about the stars on offense, the two players who might have the best chance of deciding the game are on the interior of the defensive line. The closers for the Chiefs and Eagles are their stellar defensive tackles. Chris Jones helped win the Chiefs the Super Bowl last season with a series of critical rushes at key times, including a third-down pressure in overtime that blew up what could have been the winning touchdown. On the Philadelphia side, Jalen Carter shut the door on the Rams in the divisional round with a third-down sack and a fourth-down pressure that forced Matthew Stafford to throw the ball out of bounds.

There are fascinating questions about how each should be employed. Let’s start with Jones, whose role has shifted over the years. Early in his career, he was used purely as a defensive tackle. Given how successful he had been rushing from the interior, the Chiefs tried moving him to the edge on something closer to a full-time basis on passing downs in 2021. That move didn’t take. By the end of that season, he was back to terrorizing teams from the interior.

Eventually, Jones evolved into a pass-rush joker, a player who can line up anywhere on the line on any given snap. I suspect he has leeway in deciding where he lines up and who he wants to rush against on some snaps. He is capable of winning from anywhere on the line, and that uncertainty about where he’s going to start the play unlocks so much of what Spagnuolo has been able to do with generating pressure on opposing quarterbacks.

Because they’re terrified of Jones blowing up the play on his own, most teams set their protections toward Jones, which means some or all of the offensive line will work in tandem toward the side of the field where he is lined up. If he lines up at tackle, setting the protection toward him allows for the possibility of a potential double-team. If he’s at defensive end, setting the protection toward him usually ensures the offensive tackle won’t have to account for both Jones and a potential rusher coming from outside the veteran defender. Setting the protection away from Jones means he’ll end up one-on-one against an offensive lineman, and that’s a matchup the Chiefs love.

True superstars such as Jones force the offense to show its hand before the snap has even started, and that’s an opportunity for Spagnuolo to exploit. For all of the magic and creativity offensive coordinators can come up with as part of their game plans, each team’s protection rules are mostly consistent. The best defensive coaches pick apart those protection rules. And the best defensive players allow those coaches to dictate the protections.

Let’s go back to a key moment in the Texans-Chiefs game from the divisional round. Facing a fourth-and-10 with 10 minutes to go in an eight-point game, the Texans hemmed and hawed before eventually deciding to go for it. With the ball in Kansas City territory, Houston barely got to the line in time to even see how the Chiefs were aligned. The one thing the Texans had time to see was where Jones was lined up, with No. 95 starting the snap outside right tackle against Texans rookie Blake Fisher.

Predictably, the Texans slid their line toward Jones. They chipped him with the nearest eligible player; unfortunately, that player was top wideout Nico Collins, who was delayed getting into his route as a result. While they couldn’t get a double-team on Jones from where he was aligned, they were able to slow him down from winning at the snap.

The problem came on the other side. With four offensive linemen sliding to the right to take on three Chiefs defenders, Spagnuolo blitzed safety Jaden Hicks to ensure he would have three defenders against three Texans blockers. Crucially, the Texans ended up with tight end Dalton Schultz against edge rusher George Karlaftis, a blocking mismatch in Kansas City’s favor. Schultz was barely able to get a hand on Karlaftis, who was running free at C.J. Stroud before the Houston quarterback had even made it to the end of his dropback. When Stroud tried to bail, he ran right into the path of Jones, with Karlaftis eventually chasing down Stroud for a drive-ending sack.

Three Dalton Schultz pass blocking snaps from yesterday.

1) This was the play where the Texans only got to the line with five seconds left and they slide their protection. Tough to end up one-on-one versus Karlaftis, but it's not even close.

2) This feels a little like that… pic.twitter.com/1wRCqv2Rkv

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) January 20, 2025

Jones can beat linemen to blow up plays on his own, but he can also make a serious impact simply by being on the field and dictating how offenses try to stop him. All of those adjustments can wear down an offense. On that third-down play in overtime during last season’s title game, the 49ers blew their protection altogether and allowed a totally unblocked Jones to rush Brock Purdy, blowing up the biggest play of their season. The next time Kyle Shanahan’s offense took the field in anger was in September.

The Eagles, on the other hand, present an interesting challenge. They’re one of the few teams with good-to-elite linemen across the board, including tackles who can handle Jones one-on-one without expecting to lose often. Where should Spagnuolo start his star defender? Should Jones spend most time on the interior? Or should he line up against right tackle Lane Johnson and dare Philadelphia to match its future Hall of Famer against Kansas City’s?

When these two teams played in the Super Bowl, Jones bounced around. He took 10 of his 36 pass-rushing snaps from the outside, most of which came against Johnson. He was inside for the remainder of his snaps against the pass. He spent most of the day matched up against right guard Isaac Seumalo, who was the weakest member of the Philadelphia offensive line at the time.

While the Eagles ended up losing, Jones didn’t beat them in what was comfortably his quietest Super Bowl performance in four tries. He had two pressures, and even those were something closer to bothersome than play-disrupting moments. Philadelphia slid its line toward Jones 42% of the time, which is a lower rate than I would expect most teams would typically employ, although some of the times the Eagles didn’t slide their line were either dictated by the play call (screens or RPOs, where Jones won’t have time to get home) or by the defensive alignment (where Kansas City’s personnel forced them to slide the other way.) They double-teamed Jones 33% of the time, almost always with Jason Kelce helping Seumalo or Landon Dickerson.

In the rematch during the 2023 regular season, Jones had more success. He racked up two sacks, albeit both in somewhat atypical situations. One came on a play in which he twisted as part of a T-E game and Hurts had nowhere to go with the football, with Jones eventually taking down the quarterback after 4.7 seconds. The other came on a snap in which Johnson shoved Jones toward Hurts as he passed, a movement which usually indicates a screen is on the way, only for Hurts to drop back for a downfield pass.

Trent McDuffie also had a pair of sacks off Jones’ shoulder, including a strip-sack off of a four-man sim pressure where he blitzed off the slot, the Chiefs twisted their two interior linemen and defensive end Mike Danna dropped off the line into coverage from the opposite side, creating a free path to the quarterback. McDuffie is a dynamic blitzer, and the Chiefs will try to find spots in this game where they can rush him from easily-disguised situations, like the condensed formation the Bills ran on that fourth-and-5 in the AFC Championship Game.

For Carter, there’s a little more certainty. While the Eagles have been known for rotating a deep, talented defensive line for nearly two decades, he has become something close to an every-down essential for Fangio. After lining up for 78% of the defensive snaps through Week 9, the Eagles have upped his snap rate to 93% over the second half of the season and into the postseason. (Those numbers don’t include the Week 17 blowout win over the Cowboys, where he sat down in garbage time, or the Week 18 game where the Eagles sat their starters.)

Philadelphia is blessed with what is likely the league’s best defensive tackle rotation, but Carter is one-of-a-kind. Fangio used to ask his interior defensive linemen to play gap-and-a-half techniques, which is something between the more common one- and two-gap roles defensive linemen play. In a standard defense, one-gap linemen are expected to control the gap in front of them, which allows for more penetration and potential disruption. Two-gap linemen are asked to control gaps on either side, which is more in line with containing offensive linemen and creating opportunities for linebackers to swoop in and make plays from the second level.

Fangio’s philosophy falls in the middle, where linemen are expected to control their initial gap and then a secondary gap as the snap plays out and the offense’s intentions become clear. That’s a subtle task, and the Brandon Staley-era Chargers teams are a good example of how teams without the right defensive pieces up front can struggle to stop the run in the light boxes and scheme Fangio-style defenses try to run. Fangio’s fronts are often consistent throughout his personnel groupings, although the Eagles have been a little more multiple under Fangio this season.

With the players Fangio has in Philadelphia, it hasn’t made sense to run gap-and-a-half concepts as often as he did in other places, and so the Eagles have adapted. He has an ideal two-gap tackle in Jordan Davis, who hasn’t developed into a consistently useful defender on passing downs, and a one-gap penetrator in Carter. Milton Williams leans more toward the former group, although the wildly underrated 25-year-old continues to improve and is going to get a massive contract this offseason in free agency. Moro Ojomo is still more of a project than a consistent difference-maker, so Philadelphia relies on Carter to be an every-down defender and for Davis and Williams to split most of the other work.

The Eagles will occasionally still ask Carter to play gap-and-a-half in certain situations — he’s a talented enough player to thrive in those situations — but he is at his best when given the opportunity to go after the quarterback. He’s not going to line up at defensive end, in part because the defense is so well-stocked on the outside, and in part because Fangio doesn’t use his edge defenders in that way. While he will occasionally move Carter around the interior, Carter almost always lines up on the left side of the defense, aligning against the opposing team’s right guard.

Against the Chiefs, the Eagles might want to alter that tendency. As would be the case for Jones against Johnson, lining up Carter in his usual spot would be another best-on-best matchup. He would line up against right guard Trey Smith, who would be in position to potentially get help from All-Pro center Creed Humphrey. Smith is a better run blocker than pass blocker, but there’s a reason the fourth-year pro is expected to land one of the largest deals of any player in free agency this offseason.

The glaring weak spot on the Kansas City line is at left guard, where guard Mike Caliendo entered the starting lineup late in the season after Joe Thuney shifted to left tackle. After playing just 23 offensive snaps over the first 13 games, Caliendo has played 100% of the snaps in each of the past five meaningful games.

I would say he has done an admirable job given the fact he has been dropped into the starting lineup for a team that has been in something close to must-win situations every week, but it’s also only fair to point out that teams have had success targeting him in pass protection. Jordan Phillips literally picked up Caliendo and carried him back into Mahomes for a sack in the AFC Championship Game, something we didn’t see with Thuney at left guard.

I can see a case for both sides of the argument. The Chiefs will certainly get Caliendo help from Humphrey if the Eagles line up Carter over left guard, but Fangio can use that knowledge to create one-on-ones and potential opportunities for linebacker Zack Baun and his other defenders to swoop in for tackles for loss. It might also make sense for the Eagles to line up physically overwhelming defenders such as Williams and Davis against the inexperienced Caliendo while daring Kansas City to slide its protections toward Carter over Smith at right guard, which would either ensure a one-on-one for Carter against Smith or for Williams/Davis against Caliendo.

The Eagles are typically more static with their alignments than the Chiefs, which should also define their matchups on the edge. Nolan Smith‘s role has expanded since Brandon Graham went down with a torn triceps, and the 2023 first-round pick has flourished with the additional opportunities. Playing almost exclusively across from the right tackle in the left defensive end spot, he has racked up eight sacks and 11 quarterback knockdowns over the past 10 games. He should spend this game matched up against Jawaan Taylor, who leads all players with 12 offensive holding penalties over the past two seasons. The Eagles have mostly buried free agent addition Bryce Huff this season, but if he does play, the former Jets edge rusher would also face Taylor.

On the other side, that would mean Josh Sweat and rookie Jalyx Hunt against Thuney. While Smith has excelled over the past two months, Sweat has just one sack and two knockdowns over his past eight games, figures matched by Hunt in a smaller role. On paper, the Eagles should like the matchup of Sweat against a guard playing out of position at tackle. But the Chiefs don’t have just any old guard protecting Mahomes’ blind side.

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Where will the Chiefs line up Joe Thuney?

Great coaches like to change their left tackles about once a decade. In the prior dynasty before this Chiefs era, Tom Brady and the Patriots went through 16 years with two left tackles: Matt Light and Nate Solder. In Philadelphia, Reid inherited Tra Thomas and lined him up on the blind side for 11 years. When it was time to move on, Reid traded a first-round pick to Buffalo for Jason Peters, who outlasted the legendary coach and spent the next 12 years with the Eagles.

It’s probably no surprise that Reid’s first selection after joining the Chiefs in 2013 was a left tackle. No. 1 overall pick Eric Fisher lasted eight years in Kansas City before a torn Achilles ended his career. Since then, the Chiefs have uncharacteristically won while cycling through tackles. They traded for Ravens tackle Orlando Brown Jr. and started him in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, they signed veteran Donovan Smith to a one-year deal, then used rookie Wanya Morris late in the season while Smith was injured. The former Bucs tackle returned for the playoffs, but he wasn’t re-signed in 2024 and didn’t play for another team.

The plan this season seemed clear. The Chiefs used a second-round pick on tackle Kingsley Suamataia, and he beat out Morris in training camp for the starting job. That plan lasted two weeks. With the Bengals’ Trey Hendrickson tormenting Suamataia, Reid benched the then-21-year-old tackle for Morris. Suamataia has spent most of the season on the sidelines, surfacing only for regular snaps when Morris left a November win over the Broncos with an injury and when the Chiefs rested their starters in the Week 18 rematch.

Next up was Morris. Mahomes’ QBR declined precipitously when Morris entered the lineup for the injured Smith in 2023. Though there wasn’t the same sort of fall-off this season, Morris was consistently a weak spot, committing five holding penalties in a five-week span. Mahomes ended up limping through a narrow win over the Raiders after being hit on a pressure through Morris. By the time Kansas City faced the Raiders in a late-November rematch, Morris was struggling so badly he was benched, with Thuney moved to left tackle and Caliendo into the lineup at guard.

The next man up should have been veteran tackle D.J. Humphries, whom the Chiefs signed in midseason with the clear aim of eventually finding a replacement for Morris on the left side. After the win over the Raiders, Humphries made his debut the following week against the Chargers, only to suffer a hamstring injury. He got another chance to start in the Week 18 loss to the Broncos, but Reid apparently wasn’t impressed. The 31-year-old has been featured only on special teams this postseason. Instead, the Chiefs seemingly have settled on a five-man lineup with Thuney playing out of position at left tackle. He had played left tackle in past emergencies, including most of a December game against the Bengals in 2021, but moving a star guard to tackle isn’t as easy as it might seem on paper. Guards use different footwork and angles than tackles in pass protection, which manifests in different muscle memory and literal muscles.

Thuney is better than what the Chiefs had at tackle, but he is a step down from what he usually does at guard. They have built up some continuity over the past few weeks with their current five-man unit, but they’ve also lost some of their impact running the football on the interior with Thuney at tackle.

Reid has already said the Chiefs will keep Thuney at left tackle in the Super Bowl, but if there was ever a time to stretch the truth, it’s now. Even if Kansas City starts the game with Thuney at left tackle, there’s always a scenario in which Caliendo struggles Thuney moves back inside, which would likely push Humphries into the lineup at left tackle. The Chiefs won last season with Thuney injured and unavailable at left guard, so Reid has experience playing around a potential weak spot on the interior. But if Carter wrecks Kansas City’s offense against Caliendo, Reid might have no choice but to mix things up again.

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Are the Eagles healthy on the interior?

The Chiefs come into this game about as healthy as any team has been entering the Super Bowl in recent memory. Although Rashee Rice has been on injured reserve since September with a serious knee injury, just about every other player who would take meaningful snaps is healthy. The only exception is fellow wideout Mecole Hardman, who would have had a token role on offense and served as the return man. Second-year player Nikko Remigio has done well on returns in Hardman’s absence.

The Eagles, on the other hand, have more to be worried about. While they finished the season relatively healthy, they lost Nakobe Dean to a torn patellar tendon in the playoffs. They will hope to get back edge rusher Brandon Graham from his torn triceps muscle, but the 36-year-old would take only a handful of snaps in a situational role.

The most pressing concern for the Eagles might be their interior offensive line, which is usually a strength. Center Cam Jurgens entered the NFC Championship Game with a back injury and spent the first half on the sidelines. Left guard Landon Dickerson kicked over to center, but he didn’t return in the second half after suffering a knee injury. Jurgens came off the bench and managed to grit his way through the final two quarters of a comfortable win.

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The play keeping the Eagles up at night

When it comes to game-planning, some plays coaches see on tape mean more than others. There’s a snap from the AFC Championship Game that I’m sure has stood out to Fangio and his defensive staff as they prepare for the Super Bowl. It’s going to impact Philadelphia’s defensive linemen and how they pursue and chase down Kansas City’s players. It was a brilliant call from Reid against the Bills, and while I don’t think we’ll see it again, it’ll change Sunday’s game regardless.

It’s a concept the Eagles are already familiar with, because they run different variations of it themselves with Jalen Hurts. The Chiefs actually scored two touchdowns with the same play against the Bills, although the way the concept played out post-snap was different. The concept is GT counter read bluff. Watch both times the Chiefs ran it for touchdowns against the Bills, and you’ll see one major difference:

The Chiefs running GT Counter Read Bluff for two touchdowns against the Bills.

On the first score, the defensive end stays put, and so Mahomes hands the ball to Kareem Hunt.

On the second, the defensive end crashes down, and so Mahomes keeps it and runs it in himself. pic.twitter.com/S7vqwZQaOK

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) February 4, 2025

Let’s unpack what’s going on. The Chiefs are in the same look on both snaps, with Mahomes in the pistol as part of a full-house formation. He’s surrounded on both plays by tight ends, with Travis Kelce on the left and Noah Gray motioning to his right. Kareem Hunt, whom the Chiefs have preferred as their lead back in the red zone in the postseason, is behind Mahomes as the lone running back.

At the snap, the Chiefs are running blockers in both directions. The right guard and tackle pull to the left side, which is the GT counter element of the play. (GT stands for guard and tackle.) On the first score, Hunt follows those blockers, runs through a tackle and drives into the end zone.

The bluff element is Kelce, who feigned that he was going to block the defensive end before arcing out into the flat. Mahomes read that defensive end, which was Greg Rousseau on the first iteration and Dawuane Smoot on the second. On the first snap, Rousseau stayed home and didn’t chase the running back, so Mahomes handed the ball to Hunt.

Having seen the Chiefs run this same concept for a touchdown, Smoot took the bait. When they ran what looked to be GT counter out of the same formation, he crashed down and tried to tackle Hunt. To his great surprise, though, Mahomes kept the football. With Kelce and Gray as lead blockers, the quarterback scampered for a 10-yard touchdown.

None of these concepts is foreign or brand new. If you played Pop Warner football, you know about a counter play. The idea of a quarterback reading an edge rusher permeated the league back with Robert Griffin and the Commanders, nearly 15 years ago, and this is just a gap run as opposed to a zone concept. And lots of other teams run this play or some variant of this idea, including the Eagles.

What made it so surprising for Smoot and the Bills was the timing and the context. The Chiefs had run the ball out of this exact same look for a score earlier in the game. And the idea that Mahomes even had the option to read the defensive end and hold on to the ball as part of this play simply wasn’t in any of the tape Buffalo watched for this game. Before the AFC Championship Game, Mahomes didn’t have a single designed run all season. Beyond scrambles and kneel-downs, his two runs appeared to come on broken plays, including an RPO in which he had expected to throw a screen, only for both of his receivers to block.

Mahomes’ last designed run came during the 2022 regular season, and I suspect Reid won’t be installing many more in the playbook for 2025 and beyond. The Chiefs stopped using him on sneaks when he injured his right knee on one during a 2019 victory over the Broncos, and while he has advocated to bring back the sneak in a key situation for an easy first down, Reid has resisted the urge.

It has been a different story in the postseason. Whether it has been a designed run or a play in which Mahomes clearly has the option to run as part of a broader concept, the Chiefs have relied heavily on his legs and perfect timing with playcalls involving those runs as a valuable part of the offense. In last year’s Super Bowl preview, I wrote about how he had devastated opposing defenses with his scrambles, but Reid has taken that even further since.

Go back to that game against the 49ers. In the third quarter, with the Chiefs having scored just three points during a frustrating first half, Reid dialed up the first true run play of the season for his quarterback. They went to a zone-read concept, with Mahomes reading star edge rusher Nick Bosa. With no reason to believe keeping the ball was in the game plan, an unsuspecting Bosa chased running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire all the way down to the opposite side of the field and tackled him. Gray feigned blocking Bosa and ran into the flat, occupying safety Tashaun Gipson. Mahomes ran upfield for 22 untouched yards, Kansas City’s second-biggest play of the game to that point.

Fast-forward to overtime and the Chiefs’ most critical snap of the season. With their entire season on the line, they faced a fourth-and-1, knowing that a stop would hand the title to the 49ers. Without their best lineman (Thuney) and without the ability to threaten a sneak with Mahomes, Reid was going to have to lean on the player he trusted most to extend the drive.

That turned out to be Mahomes on what looked like an identical concept, but, as Yahoo’s Nate Tice pointed out, was actually something different. While the first play was a designed run with Mahomes reading Bosa, the second play was a naked bootleg where the Chiefs bluffed blocking Bosa. Again, presumably sure that they wouldn’t run Mahomes again in a key situation, Bosa crashed inside to try to tackle the running back. Again, Kansas City had a tight end (this time Kelce) feign blocking Bosa before releasing into the flat. This time, the Chiefs didn’t have their blockers head downfield, which meant Mahomes had the ability to throw the ball. While he had Rashee Rice open, there was only one thing Mahomes was going to do once Bosa sold out. He sprinted forward for a first down to extend the game. After he scrambled for 19 yards on a third-and-1 later in the drive, they scored the touchdown that made them back-to-back champs.

Now go back to the AFC title game two weeks ago. If there was any reason Smoot might have had alarm bells going off in his head about a potential Mahomes run, it would have been based on what happened on another fourth-and-1. In the second quarter, the Chiefs faced one on their own 39-yard line. This would have been a punt situation for the first 15 to 20 years or so of Reid’s career, but the future Hall of Famer has evolved with the rest of the league.

The Chiefs didn’t call for a designed run from Mahomes, but they went to another naked bootleg concept that used his ability in space to stress the opposing defense. With Hunt at fullback and Isiah Pacheco at halfback, they got to the line and quick-snapped the ball, as if they were trying to beat the Bills with tempo. Mahomes faked handing the ball to Hunt on an inside run and immediately sprinted to the outside. Again, the Chiefs weren’t directly blocking the defensive end, Rousseau, who was only briefly chipped by JuJu Smith-Schuster. The Chiefs flooded the right side of the field with receivers, but with Smith-Schuster getting a piece of both Rousseau and linebacker Terrel Bernard, there was no reason to throw it and Mahomes had little trouble converting to move the chains.

And then, as the Chiefs tried to close out yet another conference title, they went back to the same concept. On a second-and-9 with 1:50 to go and a three-point lead, the Bills were understandably selling out to stop the run. With Hunt and Pacheco in the backfield, Mahomes again faked the belly run to Hunt. Smith-Schuster, the unsung hero of the win, somehow occupied three different defenders, while Justin Watson ran a slant designed to pick safety Damar Hamlin. While Pacheco was covered on the fourth-and-1 earlier in the game, he was wide open this time. Mahomes flipped him the ball for a 10-yard completion. Outside of Pacheco stepping out of bounds at the end of the play, this was an easy conversion for the Chiefs.

The Chiefs run the same boot concept twice for first downs against the Bills, with a Mahomes scramble on fourth-and-1 and a Isiah Pacheco catch late in the game as they were trying to run out the clock. pic.twitter.com/nFkzRZYlab

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) February 4, 2025

Fangio and his staff have surely been hammering the threat of Mahomes as a runner into the heads of their players all week. We’ve seen the Chiefs run Mahomes on designed runs and naked bootlegs in key situations, and on every fourth down, Philly’s defensive ends are going to be hesitant against a potential handoff, afraid he will keep the ball and get to the edge. That’s going to make the traditional run game more efficient in those situations.

As we saw in the third quarter of the win over the 49ers a year ago, however, Reid considers every snap of the Super Bowl to be a key situation. If the Chiefs are struggling to break through, there’s a real shot Mahomes will be given an opportunity to run. The Eagles have to be prepared for that possibility inside the red zone and even at midfield, and that’s going to create opportunities for the rest of the offense.

And then, of course, what we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we’ll get. Reid will have new wrinkles prepared, and Mahomes might have the opportunity to run off some concept where we haven’t seen him keep the ball in the past. All of that doesn’t even consider how difficult he has been to stop as a scrambler, which has tormented the Eagles and just about every other team he has faced in previous postseasons. That threat occupies linebackers and forces defenders to stay put in their rush lanes without twisting or selling out to try to get after the quarterback. The most extreme example of how that can play out in an offense’s favor might actually be earlier this postseason for the Eagles, when the Packers rushed four and refused to get out of their lanes to try to get after Hurts, only for the quarterback to have forever to throw and find Jahan Dotson for the opening touchdown of the wild-card victory.

Striking a balance between maintaining rush integrity and getting after the quarterback is essential for slowing down Mahomes, especially given that the Eagles are one of the league’s least likely teams to blitz. Being able to get home without blitzing is a philosophical plus for the Eagles in this matchup, given that Mahomes has lit up the blitz historically.

The Eagles allowed an average of 16.5 scramble yards per game to opposing quarterbacks during the regular season. While that’s about league average, it’s an impressive performance because they faced a number of quarterbacks who are adept at scrambling, including Baker Mayfield, Daniel Jones, Lamar Jackson, Bryce Young and, twice, Jayden Daniels, who managed to get to 31 scramble yards in the NFC Championship Game defeat. How can the Eagles slow down Mahomes as a runner? And what will the Chiefs do to combat Hurts’ running ability?

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How both teams will play spy games

The idea of using a player to spy the quarterback and prevent him from running has always been too simplistic of a conversation during game-day analysis. Most commonly, we talk about a spy as a player who is essentially in man-to-man coverage chasing the quarterback around the field to stop him from running. That not what happens in reality. There’s no spy on the planet who is going to be able to run with Jayden Daniels or Lamar Jackson.

We’ve seen teams use safeties and even special-teamers as spies, with Brenden Schooler playing that role for the Patriots at times this season, but that runs the risk of a defense getting run over by the conventional run game. Even those guys are going to struggle to tackle some of the league’s most elusive quarterbacks. Listen to Fangio talk about stopping Jackson and you’ll hear him say what you need to know: If there were one simple way to play a great quarterback, everybody would do it.

It’s more realistic to think about the spy as a holistic part of a broader defensive philosophy. Does a defense have multiple players with potential eyes on the quarterback or players whose responsibilities on a given play might include handling that role if the route distribution or run concept frees them up to do so? Is the defensive front and its rush aligned with who is responsible for pursuing the quarterback? Is the goal to take away potential running opportunities or to prevent the quarterback from creating a big play with his arm as part of a scramble drill?

One concept the Bills used against a series of mobile quarterbacks in Mahomes, Jackson and Bo Nix during their playoff run sounds like a combination of a techno-futuristic television show and a rap collective. “Odd mirror” dates back to Kirby Smart’s time with Nick Saban at Alabama. The goal is to use the pass rush to steer the quarterback toward escaping the pocket in one direction, where the spy will be heading to meet the passer.

The Bills ran their version of odd mirror to generate a third-down stop in the red zone against the Ravens in the divisional round. While they showed a four-man rush, Matt Milano didn’t come at the snap and instead served as the spy. The two linemen to the right side of the offensive line (the left side of the defense) slanted in to crowd the pocket, while the edge rusher outside the left tackle, Rousseau, contained Jackson from exiting through the left side.

With the rush seemingly dictating to Jackson that he should escape the pocket from the right side, he took the bait. With Milano knowing there was only one way for Jackson to go, he was able to chase him down to force an incompletion:

The Bills running Odd Mirror for a third-down stop of the Ravens in the red zone pic.twitter.com/tGgfbLGaIO

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) February 4, 2025

Every mobile quarterback has seen some form of odd mirror over the past decade, so it won’t surprise Mahomes. Fangio might not run the exact concept, but the idea is similar: Use the rush to steer Mahomes one direction, eliminate one side of the field out of the pocket and give the spy a more viable and realistic responsibility for the quarterback.

Fangio might do that with a four-man front or even while using one of his defensive ends to spy, as the Eagles did with Haason Reddick under Sean Desai when they beat the Chiefs in the 2023 regular season. Fangio didn’t use a spy on Jackson when the Eagles beat the Bills earlier this season, with his defensive line dominating the line of scrimmage instead.

In Super Bowl LVII, when Fangio served as a consultant for the Eagles, Jonathan Gannon’s defense didn’t seem to spy Mahomes much. There might have been a handful of snaps in which linebackers Kyzir White and T.J. Edwards spied Mahomes, but Philadelphia relied more on its pass rush to contain the quarterback in the pocket and chase him down if he escaped. They did a decent job of pressuring Mahomes, but one of the most ferocious pass rushes in NFL history didn’t finish the task: They failed to sack Mahomes, a feat the Chiefs’ offensive line celebrated in the locker room.

One of the problems with spying Mahomes? The Chiefs have a superstar tight end who already serves as a tall order for linebackers and safeties. Covering Kelce is a nightmare, and in addition to Reid’s ability to scheme Kelce open, the future Hall of Famer has an innate understanding of defensive spacing that torments coverages. While there probably aren’t plays in the playbook in which Kelce is designed to run a route that creates an opportunity for Mahomes to scramble, key snaps can end up playing out that way in practice.

Critically, there was no spy on Mahomes on what might have been the backbreaking play that set up the game-winning field goal two years ago. With the Chiefs facing a first-and-10 from the Eagles’ 43-yard line in a tied game and 2:55 to go, Philadelphia rushed five and played single-high coverage behind, leaving nobody to spy Mahomes. Creed Humphrey was able to block Jordan Davis at nose tackle to one side, creating a running lane for Mahomes. With Pacheco blocking to one side of the field and Kelce chipping before running into the flat, both linebackers were removed from the middle of the field, leaving nothing but green grass ahead for Mahomes, who ran for 26 yards and a key first down.

The last time Fangio faced Mahomes was in the 2023 playoffs, when the Dolphins faced the Chiefs in the wild-card round. The game plan the coordinator used that day might not bear much resemblance to what the Eagles do Sunday, if only because of the dramatic differences in personnel. While the Eagles have a stacked defensive line, that Miami team was down its top two edge rushers in Bradley Chubb and Jaelan Phillips, both of whom had suffered season-ending injuries. Needing to send extra pressure toward the Chiefs quarterback to survive, Fangio blitzed on 51.2% of dropbacks, his third-highest blitz rate in 223 games as a coordinator since 2007. It would be a major surprise if we saw anything like that from Fangio on Sunday.

The Chiefs, meanwhile, have to worry about an entirely different sort of run game. While Mahomes picks his spots with designed runs, Hurts is a regular part of the Eagles’ rushing attack. Everybody knows about the tush push, but he has 11 carries for 86 yards and two touchdowns on designed runs that aren’t sneaks, scrambles or kneel-downs this postseason. That includes a 9-yard touchdown against the Commanders on an iso run with Barkley serving as the lead blocker and a 44-yard score on counter read bash against the Rams.

In the past, Spagnuolo used linebacker Willie Gay as a spy on mobile quarterbacks Hurts and Josh Allen. This season, when the Chiefs have chosen to use a spy as part of their fronts, the player who has typically taken on those responsibilities is third linebacker Leo Chenal, who plays as part of the base defense behind Nick Bolton and Drue Tranquill.

The appropriate term for Chenal’s role in the defense might be “fixer.” If there’s a role Spagnuolo needs filled, Chenal is probably going to be the guy called on to take care of it. He has played edge defender, defensive tackle, off-ball linebacker and even lined up for 23 snaps as a slot defender this season. He finished with more snaps on the line of scrimmage (229) than off (198).

Heading into the Super Bowl a year ago, Chenal was an obvious X factor and potential target for 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan to exploit. Instead, he had an awesome game on defense and special teams: He forced a Christian McCaffrey fumble, pressured Brock Purdy into a throwaway and produced two tackles for loss, including a takedown of Jauan Jennings for an 8-yard setback. He also blocked a kick, a feat he repeated this season to seal a victory over the Broncos.

This time, Chenal might be able to make a more subtle impact. When he’s at or near the line of scrimmage, the Eagles are going to feel like it’s a mismatch for their offensive linemen. He can make a difference by holding his own at the point of attack, by setting an edge and by making the initial tackle on Hurts or Barkley without allowing something more substantial. Chenal has posted a missed tackle rate below 5% each of the past two seasons, which is excellent, but Barkley and Hurts aren’t average ball carriers.

The Chiefs have struggled to stop quarterbacks from running this season. Including the postseason, they’ve allowed opposing passers to average more than 27 rushing yards per game, the fifth most of any team. That might be the cost of doing business if Spagnuolo is going to dial up exotic blitzes and flush the quarterback as often as he does, but it certainly seems like an opportunity for Hurts and the Eagles to exploit.

The Eagles might also want to lean into the size of their linemen with more gap scheme runs, like the counter bash play Hurts scored on against the Rams. There’s a notable difference in how Kansas City performs against certain types of runs. Per analysis by ESPN Research, the Chiefs allowed minus-0.14 EPA per snap against zone runs this season, which was the second-best mark for any team. Against gap scheme runs (such as power, counter or duo) that fell to 22nd, with the Chiefs allowing 0.04 EPA per run. Kansas City’s defense had the league’s best success rate against zone runs, but it ranked 16th against gap runs.

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Could this be a Vic Fangio revenge game?

While there’s no need for motivation with a championship on the line, there might be a little extra riding on this one for Fangio. The legendary defensive coordinator has done just about everything there is to do in football besides win a Super Bowl. One year after unceremoniously parting ways with the Dolphins, he has done incredible work in rebuilding the Eagles from their amateurish end to last season into the league’s best defense over the past four months.

And if Fangio were going to win that ring against anybody, it sure wouldn’t hurt if the guy on the other side of the field was Andy Reid. I’m not saying there are hard feelings between the two veteran coaches, but Reid has tormented Fangio in recent years. In three years as Denver’s coach, Fangio went 0-6 against Reid’s Chiefs. When he joined the Eagles as a consultant during the 2022 playoffs, Fangio lost to Reid in the Super Bowl. And in 2023, during his lone season with the Dolphins, Fangio’s final game was … a loss to the Chiefs in Kansas City. That’s eight straight defeats against Reid-coached teams.

After Fangio’s work molding the Bears into an elite defense led him to earn a head coaching job with the Broncos in 2019, we saw former Fangio assistants and philosophically aligned coaches earn significant opportunities across the league. His philosophies seemed to align with where the meta of NFL defenses was heading. Teams wanted to take away the big plays from opposing offenses, give play-action quarterbacks different looks as they turned their back post-snap and play with light boxes to lure teams back into running the ball.

For a minute, it felt like 2023 might have been the year the Fangio Bubble burst. The man himself was let go by the Dolphins, with his former players seemingly celebrating the decision in public. In Los Angeles, the Chargers lost patience with Brandon Staley’s never-ending defensive rebuild and fired their coach, who had earned a head coaching job after installing a version of Fangio’s defense with the Rams. Former Bears assistant Sean Desai was removed from playcalling duties and eventually lost his job as Eagles defensive coordinator, Joe Barry was fired after the season by the Packers, and Ejiro Evero struggled to right the ship in Carolina. Outside of Raheem Morris, who earned a head coaching job with the Falcons after maintaining some of the Fangio principles the Rams ran under Staley, most of the people running Fangio’s defense endured difficult 2023 campaigns.

Fangio has thrived with the Eagles, though. After a rough start and a 33-16 loss to the Buccaneers, they hit their bye week and have been the league’s best defense since. While he has evolved and made minor shifts in ways mentioned elsewhere in this preview, this is the same Fangio-style defense Philadelphia was running under Desai a year ago.

It’s easy to understand why the scheme might look a little better when it’s coached by the man himself, but the biggest difference between the 2023 Eagles and 2024 Eagles is that the talent has gotten much better. By the end of last season, when Desai gave way to Matt Patricia’s quickly forgotten run as defensive playcaller, they weren’t generating any pass rush, made routine mental mistakes in coverage and simply didn’t have the athleticism needed to hold up in the secondary.

Then, general manager Howie Roseman added four Pro Bowl-caliber defenders in one offseason. (This doesn’t even include Saquon Barkley.) Fangio’s defense relies on speed and communication in the secondary, and the Eagles fixed their defensive backfield with three moves. Roseman brought back safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson after one year with the Lions. Then, after James Bradberry and the team’s other cornerbacks struggled down the stretch, he used Philly’s first two picks on Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean.

Those additions completely changed what the Eagles are capable of doing on defense. While Fangio’s defense often appears as a two-high shell before the snap, his teams play single-high with the middle of the field closed more often than not after the snap. Depending on the strength of the offensive formation or the defensive playcall, he will essentially ask his cornerbacks to play man or some form of man-match coverage at the snap as part of a broader zone concept. By the end of 2023, Philadelphia just didn’t have enough guys in its secondary who could cover in those spots.

As a player who once served primarily as a slot cornerback with the Saints, Gardner-Johnson has the coverage chops and instincts to read and blanket opposing receivers, especially when Fangio asks him to poach routes from the other side of the field in what he refers to as a Trix call. While teams will occasionally beat him with bigger receivers for touchdowns — as the Rams did with Tyler Higbee in the divisional round — Gardner-Johnson’s playmaking and ability to get to the line of scrimmage against the run are essential for this defense to succeed.

The upgrades at cornerback have been even more substantial. Replacing Bradberry and Avonte Maddox with Mitchell and DeJean has dramatically improved the speed at which this secondary plays. Mitchell’s patience and poise has been remarkable. In addition to quickly scaring away teams from throwing outs in his direction early this season, his first pass interference call of the season didn’t come until the wild-card round.

After starting the season in a reserve role, the move to shift DeJean into the starting lineup as the slot corner for Maddox seemed to be the transformative step for this defense. The Eagles ranked 30th in EPA per attempt on throws to slot receivers between the start of 2023 and the first four weeks of 2024. Since DeJean was inserted into the lineup after the Week 5 bye, they have had the best EPA per snap on those same slot targets.

The 2023 Eagles simply couldn’t go drives without blowing assignments for easy completions. It’s remarkable to see the 2024 secondary work together to pass off routes, identify route distributions in real time and end up in the right places to execute Fangio’s gameplan. They tackle well, too — they’ve allowed the second fewest yards after catch over expectation (YACOE) per completion of any team this season, trailing only the Chiefs, per NFL Next Gen Stats.

One of Fangio’s philosophical goals is to muddy up the coverage picture for the quarterback and prevent him from getting a clear read of what the defense is running, which slows down his processing and gives the pass rush time to get home. The hope is that the quarterback will take the safe throw underneath, pick up a modest gain and simply be too impatient to avoid taking the shot downfield or have his offense run its way into a penalty, a sack or a tackle for loss. The Eagles allowed explosive gains of 15 yards or more on a league-low 10.5% of snaps during the regular season.

And yet, if there’s anybody who has exhibited the ability to both take those throws the Fangio defense is daring quarterbacks to hit over and over again and do so with aplomb, it’s Mahomes. The guy who was once the league’s most devastating downfield passer has as many deep completions over the past two seasons as Gardner Minshew. Mahomes ranks 30th out of 34 quarterbacks in yards per attempt on deep throws and has nine picks on 106 attempts. I’m obviously not chalking that up to his skill suddenly disappearing; it’s a product of inconsistent play and availability from his receivers, and defenses choosing to take away things downfield.

Instead, Mahomes thrives by routinely converting third downs at an outlier level. Over the past two season, the Chiefs rank 15th in EPA per play on first and second down and first in the league on third down (in snaps in which Mahomes has been on the field). They’re the second-best team over that stretch at picking up third-and-medium (56%) and the best in the league on third-and-long (32%). When a team does that once, it’s a fluke. When it outperforms expectations on third downs almost every season for nearly a decade, it’s that team’s thing.

The combination of Mahomes and Reid, as you’ve probably learned by now, is so difficult to stop. Go back to the AFC Championship Game again. When the Bills came out with a zone-heavy approach on the first two drives of the game, Mahomes hit a series of RPOs to scare them out of their gameplan, with the Chiefs scoring a touchdown on the opening drive and marching down the field before fumbling away an exchange on the second. Buffalo coach Sean McDermott switched to more man coverage as the game wore along, and Reid used an endless series of picks to create free runners and stacks to produce leverage for his receivers.

Without a true WR1, the Chiefs thrive on offense with those concepts. They want to get their speedy wideouts, Hollywood Brown and Xavier Worthy, in positions where they can run away from defensive backs on crossing routes. The vertical shots to those guys just generally haven’t worked in 2024. They’re getting to them on slants and glances as part of the RPOs. And then they’re going to make you fight through trash and communicate through motion to get to throws to the running backs in the flat.

The Chiefs have used some form of motion nearly 79% of the time in the playoffs, up from 64% during the regular season. That’s not going to scare the Eagles, who are the league’s best defense by EPA per play against teams using motion, but Kansas City swung the last Super Bowl with these two teams by using motion to score three touchdowns. In addition to the Kadarius Toney and Skyy Moore touchdowns, Travis Kelce‘ score was aided by short motion, where he shifted narrowly inside before the snap but gained favorable leverage against safety Marcus Epps in the process for an out-breaking route. Nobody gets more out of those small shifts and short motions than Kelce and Reid.

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Do the Eagles have (or need) a Kelce stopper?

Two years ago, when I previewed this game, one of the conversations I hit was the idea of how the Eagles would stop Kelce. The future Hall of Famer was coming off of a 1,338-yard, 12-touchdown season, a 14-catch game in the divisional round and three scores in the first two rounds of the postseason. With the Eagles focusing less on linebacker than other positions, Kelce seemed like a mismatch. And while he didn’t take over the game, he had six catches on six targets for 81 yards and a score.

Two years later, this isn’t necessarily the same Kelce. The target volume hasn’t dropped off precipitously, but what he does on those targets has. He averaged 12.2 yards per reception in 2022, but that was down to 8.5 in 2024, which ranked 29th out of 32 tight ends with 50 targets or more. He averaged 0.8 yards after first contact, down a full yard from where he was two seasons ago. He was still productive and a useful part of the offense, but he seemingly wasn’t the guy who could take over games the way we saw in key moments in previous seasons.

And then he faced the Texans in the divisional round happened. Kelce had seven catches for 117 yards and a touchdown on eight targets. Facing a team with an elite secondary, Reid shifted the game plan to attack Houston’s linebackers in coverage, and Kelce responded with a vintage performance.

McDermott and the Bills noticed. In the AFC Championship Game, the Bills were keenly aware of Kelce and spent more time double-teaming him than I would have expected. While Kelce turned four targets into 19 yards, he was open for more, including at least one huge gain when he split a double-team and turned upfield, only for Mahomes to be looking in the other direction. He was instead valuable as a blocker on Mahomes’ counter touchdown run and as the picker on various crosser concepts.

Kelce is also so difficult to cover for a defense that is well-coached, because he has the ability to improvise and make his own adjustments. Fangio’s defense keys on route combinations and film study to anticipate where the ball is going. Kelce’s innate ability to find space and Mahomes’ sixth sense for where Kelce’s going to go mean the tight end won’t necessarily end up where the Eagles are expecting.

As Shawn Syed noted, Fangio has a range of coverages he can use to double or focus the coverage’s attention on Kelce. It’s unclear whether he’ll feel the need to do so. I would suspect the Eagles will mix things up and try to double Kelce in some key situations, particularly in the red zone, while being a little less concerned about Kelce than they might have been two years ago.

The Eagles are different than they were in 2022, too. Even Roseman would probably admit Philadelphia stumbled onto something they weren’t expecting when they signed Zack Baun this offseason. Baun and Nakobe Dean won the two starting linebacker jobs in camp, with free-agent addition Devin White released after being paid $3.5 million without ever playing a regular-season snap for the team. (Eagles additions in the offseason were either really good or really disappointing.) When Baun sacked Malik Willis on a Hail Mary attempt to close out the Week 1 win over the Packers, they might have known that they were onto something.

Baun ended up producing an historically impressive season for an off-ball linebacker. He led all linebackers with 25.7 EPA generated for his team as the nearest defender in coverage, per Next Gen Stats. Nobody in the league recorded a higher percentage of their team’s tackles, and those were usually meaningful: He produced 88 stuffs, which are tackles that generate negative EPA for the opposing offense, the second-most for any player.

The 28-year-old has then added two tackles for loss, an interception and a forced fumble during the postseason. While Barkley understandably (and deservedly) has gotten national attention this season, Baun has been nearly as valuable of an addition on defense. He has been a transformative player for this defense and the biggest bargain on a veteran deal in the league.

Fangio took advantage of Baun’s time with the Saints as a pass rusher and used him to get after the quarterback as part of pressure concepts during the regular season. He has been more than capable in coverage this season, but his best role is going to be attacking the line of scrimmage and taking down opposing ball carriers. Like a supercharged version of what Chenal is doing for the Chiefs, Baun is the guy who can make a lot of things work by doing a wide range of things well.

The biggest weak spot for the Eagles, though, might be next to Baun. Dean had an excellent season, but he tore his patellar tendon in the win over the Packers and was forced to miss the remainder of the postseason. The guy he was replaced by in the lineup will be familiar to the Chiefs, who were able to take advantage of him in last year’s Super Bowl.

Oren Burks probably wasn’t expecting to play many coverage snaps in the title game a year ago. As the third linebacker for the 49ers, he was playing in a two-down role alongside stars Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw, whose combined coverage range seemed to span the state of California.

Then fate struck. In the second quarter, Greenlaw tore his Achilles as he was running onto the field. Burks was forced into an every-down role while facing an offense capable of picking teams apart over the middle of the field if they’re not agile in coverage or sound with their drops and depths as a zone defender.

And, well, Burks was picked apart. NFL Next Gen Stats credited Burks with allowing six catches on six targets for 51 yards and a touchdown. He wasn’t the only one being picked on, as the safeties behind him also struggled in coverage throughout the game, but the Chiefs were happy to throw towards or past Burks as the game went on. It’s impossible to blame him given the circumstances, but there was a downgrade going from what the 49ers expected of Greenlaw to what they got from Burks.

Back in the Super Bowl yet again, Burks won’t be unexpectedly foisted into the spotlight. He has been playing alongside Baun as the starter since the Green Bay game, and he has done well for himself. He has always been a solid run defender, and perhaps owing to the talent around him, he has held his own as a zone defender.

With that being said, the Commanders had a clear philosophy in the NFC title game. They wanted to isolate and attack Burks, Baun and Reed Blankenship in coverage, which meant a heavy dose of Zach Ertz as part of their two tight end sets. Those three players were targeted a combined 19 times as the nearest defenders in coverage, per Next Gen Stats. Burks actually had the best numbers of the bunch, as his five targets turned into four catches for 10 yards.

The Chiefs are going to try to do the same thing, using spacing and their route distributions to isolate Kelce, Noah Gray and their three running backs against Burks and the other middle-of-the-field defenders in as much room as possible. They’ll test Burks’ eye discipline and ranginess in coverage on RPOs. When they need a big play, expect Mahomes to go here.

One other solution the Chiefs might consider doing more often than they would typically against opposing defenses would be spreading the Eagles out and going with an empty formation. Philadelphia led the league in most defensive categories this season, but when teams went to empty looks against them, they ranked 22nd in EPA per play.

The Chiefs simply don’t use those empty backfields often, but they might have noticed the Commanders enjoy some success with their empty packages in the NFC title game. Jayden Daniels & Co. generated 0.07 EPA on 19 snaps out of empty and minus-0.17 EPA per play otherwise, which is the difference between a top-10 defense and the worst unit in football over a full season. Going empty should allow the Chiefs to stretch the weaker coverage defenders for the Eagles and create quick completions for Mahomes, mitigating the pass rush.

And as for Fangio and his defenders, the thing they’ll have to face that makes Mahomes so difficult to stop is the second play. When he talked about Mahomes last season as Dolphins defensive coordinator, he discussed the idea of having to defend both the initial play call and what Mahomes and his receivers improvise up as the play goes along. What they’ve done all season shows us the Eagles can handle the initial call. It’s been nearly impossible for defenses to shut down the second play for Mahomes in playoff games over the past few seasons.

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The Eagles are good … but also lucky

The Eagles literally started their playoff run by recovering a fumble, as Green Bay’s Keisean Nixon coughed up the opening kickoff for a short field and an early Philadelphia touchdown. They’ve forced 10 takeaways through three games without turning the ball over once. That plus-10 turnover margin nearly matches what Philadelphia did during the regular season (plus-11). It’s also tied for the second-best mark ever by a team in the playoffs before the Super Bowl.

Can they keep that up? It’ll be tough. One of the ways they’ve gotten to that plus-10 margin is by falling on loose footballs. The Eagles have recovered both of their fumbles on offense. They forced nine fumbles on defense and special teams, falling on six of those. In all, they have recovered just under 73% of the fumbles in their postseason games.

In the limited sample of teams making deep postseason runs with such sterling turnover margins, things have not ended well. Here are the five teams before the Eagles that have posted a turnover margin of plus-nine or better through the conference title game:

• The 1985 Patriots produced an NFL-record plus-12 turnover margin across their first three postseason wins. They promptly faced a Bears team you might remember hearing about in Super Bowl XX. The Bears posted a plus-four turnover margin in the title game and even scored on a pick-six. This will become a trend.

• The 1986 Washington team generated a plus-10 turnover margin in its three games. Unfortunately, even with the gaudy turnover margin, it lost 17-0 to the Giants in the NFC Championship Game. Washington recovered 82% of the fumbles in its games that postseason.

• The 2008 Cardinals posted a plus-nine turnover margin in their trip to the Super Bowl, including a win over a Reid-led Eagles team as home underdogs in the NFC Championship Game. A spectacular postseason from Larry Fitzgerald drew plenty of attention, but the Cardinals’ turnover margin helped swing a pair of close games. In Super Bowl XLIII, Arizona lost the turnover battle 2-1 and lost the game 27-23, with the opposing Steelers buoyed by a 100-yard interception return from James Harrison.

• The 2001 Rams probably didn’t need the help given their offense, but they recovered 83.3% of fumbles and produced a plus-nine turnover margin in their first two postseason games. Advancing to Super Bowl XXXVI as heavy favorites against the Patriots, the Rams lost the turnover battle 3-0, allowed a pick-six to Ty Law and eventually dropped the game on a kick by Adam Vinatieri.

• The 1998 Broncos are the only exception in this group, as they posted a plus-nine turnover margin and then had a plus-three turnover margin in a Super Bowl XXXIII victory over the Falcons. Denver recovered all eight of its fumbles that postseason, including a 6-for-6 performance in a 23-10 AFC title game victory over the Jets.

Is Philadelphia doomed to give up a defensive score? No. Five isn’t a meaningful sample. What this does tell us, though, is that it’s difficult to sustain a dominant turnover margin for the entire playoffs. The Eagles are 33-2 under Nick Sirianni in the regular season and postseason when they win the turnover battle. One of those losses was to the Chiefs in 2021.

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Do both teams have special teams concerns?

The most pressing special teams concern appears to be with the kicking games. Jake Elliott hasn’t been his usually solid self for the Eagles. The veteran went 1-for-7 on kicks of 50-plus yards this season and was the sixth-worst kicker in the league in EPA on field goal attempts. He has gone 6-for-6 on tries inside of 50 in the postseason, but he missed his lone try from 50-plus and three of his 12 extra-point attempts for the season, which isn’t the sort of performance Philadelphia wants to see heading into a Super Bowl.

For the Chiefs, Harrison Butker struggled earlier this season with an injury that led him to undergo knee surgery. Upon returning, he’s 7-of-9 on field goals and 13-of-14 on extra points, although that includes a 29-yarder he missed wide with his first field goal attempt after the injury.

The Eagles prefer to use backup running back Kenneth Gainwell on kick returns, but the 25-year-old left the Commanders game after suffering a concussion and is questionable for the Super Bowl. If Gainwell isn’t back, it would mean an expanded role for Will Shipley, who could take over the second back duties and potentially serve as the team’s kick returner. Cornerback Isaiah Rodgers can also serve on kick returns if needed.

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My Super Bowl LIX pick

If you were hoping there would be a clear choice for which team to pick at the end of all those words, you’re not the only one. I came into the preview not having a strong feeling and now feel like things are even closer. Sometimes, these games can get decided by the unpredictable, like Dre Greenlaw tearing his Achilles running onto the field or the Eagles scoring on a touchdown pass to Nick Foles.

It’s easy and too simplistic to look at what has happened this season and say it’s tough to see those outliers keeping up. Barkley has produced long runs at an unsustainable rate … but he’s doing it just about every week. Mahomes can’t keep winning all these close games … but he has been doing it for over a year.

It’s tough for me to see the Eagles blowing out the Chiefs, even if they might be the better roster on paper, if only because it’s impossible to hold Mahomes down for four quarters. And if it’s going to be a close game, I’m not sure how I can pick against Kansas City and watch 60 minutes of football without regretting my decision. There have just been too many times when the future Hall of Famers of this Chiefs dynasty — Mahomes, Kelce, Jones, Reid and Spagnuolo — have made that perfect adjustment or come up with that critical play when they have needed to thrive. I believe they’ll do that again. Chiefs 27, Eagles 24.