During the opening drive of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 35-12 win over the New York Jets, the offense faced third-and-short. With last week’s goal-line loss in mind, the team had an immediate chance to bounce back in a short-yardage situation.
And with the narrative that the team avoids running quarterback sneaks on the top of everybody’s mind, backup quarterback Justin Fields joined Patrick Mahomes in the huddle and eventually lined up under center. After an official time out and re-huddle, Fields’ attempt
to move the chains by sneaking failed — and ended in a turnover.
After the game, head coach Andy Reid was asked about the failed attempt, the first time a Chiefs offense has run the sneak with an actual quarterback since the 2019 season.
“You guys asked for it, so we gave it to you,” Reid said to FOX4 sports reporter Harold Kuntz. “And it didn’t work. How’d you feel?”
“Those are hard to practice, live,” Reid continued. “The quarterback sneak is hard to practice, unless you do it in a game, so we just have to get those two on the same page on it and make sure we get the ball up on it first, into the quarterback’s hands, and we can roll from there.”
According to Sam McDowell of The Kansas City Star, Fields was 7/8 converting quarterback sneaks for the Jets last season. His first attempt for the Chiefs failed spectacularly.
“It had a little tush push to it, right into the ground,” Reid said later.
There’s a lot of irony in Reid pointing to a lack of ability to practice the sneak “live” when explaining the attempt that looked doomed from the start. One way to correct that would be to run the play more often than Reid has in the seven years since Mahomes’ injury.
Speaking of the two-time MVP, he flared out left on the play, watching the failed play with a front-row seat. He pointed to the officiating reset as a reason for the lack of execution.
“We kind of got messed up with the timing of it,” Mahomes shared at the podium post-game. “We were trying to surprise the defense when we broke the huddle, and with the spot, we had to re-huddle again, and their defense got to adjust to it.”
Still, Mahomes understands it’s a poor excuse for one of the most commonly executed plays in football. He alluded to the fact that the unit may still be learning the procedure.
“We have to make it happen. You have to work on that stuff,” Mahomes noted. “It’s new to the guys, but as long as we keep executing at a high level short-yardage-wise, we’ll find different ways to do it.”
In the locker room after the game, Fields told Matt Derrick of ChiefsDigest.com and Steve St. John of 810 Sports Radio that the team first put the play in “last week.”
“I knew it was a possibility,” Fields said about running the sneak this week. “But it was just a normal play in the game plan; it wasn’t necessarily emphasized.”
Based on Reid’s words, a failed attempt shouldn’t stop Kansas City from running the sneak in the future; it should make them better for the next one.
Still, we don’t know if Mahomes would ever run a sneak — and it’s still worth questioning the process that led to the quarterback sneak being worked on in practice only recently.
