If the Kansas City Chiefs are going to come away from the AFC Championship Game with a win, they’ll need all the help they can get against the Baltimore Ravens. Star players must step up, especially quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce.
Luckily for Kansas City, they just got a glimpse of that in the Divisional Round.
In Sunday’s triumph over the Buffalo Bills, Mahomes completed nearly 75% of his passes and tossed a pair of touchdowns. He was tremendous all evening long in perhaps his cleanest game of the 2023-24 campaign. Kelce turned back the clock, as he was the recipient of both scores through the air. That served as Kelce’s first multi-touchdown game of the season, also his first in exactly one year.
This week, head coach Andy Reid described the connection his two best offensive players have.
“They’ve got a special chemistry,” Reid said. “I experienced it with Brett (Favre) and (Sterling) Sharpe, I mean they were phenomenal together and then I experienced it with T.O. (Terrell Owens) and Donovan (McNabb), they were great together. DeSean Jackson stepped in and that chemistry there with Jeremy (Maclin) and then come here and these guys develop this chemistry. It’s been — I’ve been fortunate to be around that, but it’s hard to explain why and how these guys connect like that but they do. They both have great feel for the game and then they have a great feel for what the other one sees and is going to do in a very short time span.”
Reid has used the word “special” when referring to the Mahomes-Kelce duo before. In fact, he did it less than a week ago when the two broke a record for the most postseason touchdowns between any quarterback-receiver combo in NFL history. Reid, who’s been around for Kelce’s entire career, knows how beneficial having Mahomes is for him.
It’s also well-documented just how much Kelce can help Mahomes, too. Since Mahomes took over for Alex Smith as the Chiefs’ full-time starter, the pairing with Kelce has cemented itself as the NFL’s best. It rivals duos like Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison and many others. According to Mahomes, it all comes down to wanting to win.
“I think it’s just at the end of the day, we want to compete,” Mahomes said. “We want to go out there and win. We don’t care how it’s done, we don’t care if we have a lot of yards, a lot of touchdowns we just want to win. You can see that when you hear him talk, it’s about everyone’s success not just his. I respect that. Like I said, he was here before I got here, so I could see that from day one when I stepped in the building. When you have a bunch of guys that really want to win no matter what it takes, no matter who gets the shine, that’s when you get the great football teams.”
Mahomes and Kelce are no strangers to showing up big-time against AFC opponents en route to the Super Bowl. In the 2019 season’s Divisional Round, Mahomes threw for 321 yards and five touchdowns and Kelce hauled in 10 passes for 134 yards and three scores against the Houston Texans. Current Chiefs safety Justin Reid was on that Houston team, and that game is still fresh in his mind. He’s happy to be heading into battle with Mahomes and Kelce instead of playing against them.
“It’s a hell of a lot more fun to play with them than it is to play against them, that’s first and foremost,” Reid said. “When I was with Houston, we played against Travis and it’s just a tough matchup. Those guys are both so cerebral and smart, played a lot of football and their chemistry is at a level where they’re able to create a lot of routes to where it is almost impossible to defend. You’re playing along with what you see on the tape and when you get to the game and see the same formation, and they do something different based off what they see and they’re able to get the ball to each other. It’s truly a dynamic and special relationship that those two have, both on the field and off the field. Like I said, it’s a lot more fun to be on this side of it than being the guy to defend it.”
