With less than a minute left in a shockingly tied game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Carolina Panthers, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes took off running. It’s a frequent late-game move for Mahomes, who made a 33-yard scramble his fifth rushing attempt of the day, moving the Chiefs into field goal range. After a pair of clock-running handoffs to move KC’s kicker closer, undrafted rookie Spencer Shrader hit a 31-yard field goal to secure an all-too-close victory.
After the game, Mahomes was asked about his game-sealing scamper and how he was able to produce a massive play on the ground to help secure the 10th win of Kansas City’s season. “We expected a man coverage, they got into a type of, like, match zone, so they covered up our routes and I got out to the left,” Mahomes said. “And at that point in the game, yards were more important than getting out of bounds, and so with the three timeouts, I tried to just cut through, and I think it was Justin Watson, I haven’t seen the video, but I thought he had a great block, I think it was him, and I was able to get down the field and get out of bounds. Um, kinda. Fumbled out of bounds. But I got out of bounds, and I got us in field goal range.”
Regarding his awareness of the yards-vs.-time relationship of the play, Mahomes was asked how he thinks about late-game situations like Sunday’s. “I think it’s just certain times in games,” Mahomes said. “It’s not like I pre-plan that type of stuff. It’s just, whenever it comes down to it and you’ve got to make the play, I feel like I try to go out there and make the play. That’s why I feel like it happens later in games sometimes and in the playoffs. You don’t want to slide, you have to kind of put your body out there knowing that you can take hits and stuff like that, but we’ve been able to make some big runs in some big moments.”
MAHOMES. 33-YARD RUN.
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After a full week of practice with no official listing on the team’s injury report, Mahomes was asked if he would have been able to make that scramble in previous weeks as he nursed an ankle injury. “I don’t know,” Mahomes said. “I always say adrenaline will get you through it, but it is helping a lot when you get a little bit healthier and you can kind of get your body back into it. Credit to the training staff, they stayed on top of me about being in there as much as possible, and I was finally able to get off that list this last week and get back to just my normal routine, and we went out there and made something happen.”
