Mahomes' Ability to Succeed From the Pocket Gets the Chiefs Back to the Super Bowl

Patrick Mahomes’ ankle clearly hobbled him enough against the Bengals to prevent those sideline-to-sideline highlight-worthy scrambles we all love watching. It didn’t impact his movement within the pocket, though, which is the most important type of mobility for a quarterback.

Maybe that’s why it also didn’t prevent Mahomes from playing such a good game against a very tough Bengals defense.

Mahomes has always been able to play at a high level from the pocket, something he doesn’t always get the necessary credit for. He’s known more for those exciting second-reaction plays. But as Ed wrote prior to the game, when Mahomes gets into trouble it is actually because he gets into that scrambling/play-maker mode before it’s absolutely necessary. It happened in last year’s AFC Championship against the Bengals, in fact.

That element of his game was reeled in against Cincinnati on Sunday. Yet it didn’t stop Mahomes from being able to manipulate the defense, create completions, or find his receivers for big plays, even late in the down. He just had to do it all from the pocket.

You could see it on this 3rd-and-10 late in the third quarter. The Chiefs aligned in a 2x2 formation. Travis Kelce would run a wheel route to the boundary. Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Skyy Moore would run a post-dig combination to the other side of the field:

Mahomes looked to Kelce first, but could see that he was doubled: