With trophies at stake, the Chiefs get a grip

A brazen pass to an embattled receiver wraps up another AFC title for Kansas City.

Marquez Valdes-Scantling

Andy Reid was asked if it was difficult to make that last call, the up-top pass to Marquez Valdes-Scantling that put a bow on the AFC Championship Sunday.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said. “Just a couple of words.”

He was joking and he wasn’t, which is often the case. He was talking about educated risk vs. habitual risk, and, ultimately, the difference between Kansas City’s win in Baltimore and Detroit’s loss in San Francisco that sets up a high-rolling Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

The Chiefs had swaggered into Baltimore, energized by the disbelief around them. They hogged the ball, they won the matchup that featured Travis Kelce against safety Kyle Hamilton, but their offensive line had begun to fray in the second half. They got the ball with a 17-10 lead and 2:34 left, on their own 25, and if they could only exhaust the clock and make the Ravens use their time outs, the game was theirs.

Baltimore cooperated, as it had all day, with two addled penalties – 12 men on the field and a roughness call on Roquan Smith. The Chiefs were on their own 46 after Baltimore used its final time out, with a third-and-9.

Convert it and they’re fine. Fall short, and they’re at the mercy of Lamar Jackson, in front of a frothing home crowd that was watching the first AFC Championship game in Baltimore since 1970.

Instead of singling out Kelce or maybe running up the middle and playing the field position game with a punt, the Chiefs sensed the Ravens would blitz and they rolled a pair of loaded dice. They sent Valdes-Scantling, whose trembling hands had dropped footballs in big situations this season, over the top on linebacker Arthur Maulet. Patrick Mahomes got the time and lofted a 32-yard strike. Moments later Mahomes was kneeling in his most familiar formation, the one that signals victory in January. He and the Chiefs will visit the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years and will try to bring home their third Lombardi in Reid’s tenure.

“We thought it would be zero coverage and it was, and if it was zero coverage the ball was coming to me, and it did,” said Valdez-Scantling, whose egregious drop at the end of the home loss to Philadelphia was a symbol of the Chiefs’ late-autumn funk. Another drop during an eventual win over Cincinnati accelerated the doubt.

“That kid has taken a beating here,” Reid said. “I thought he was phenomenal. He was able to hang in there and battle.”

Seventeen games, the current NFL schedule, is only one more than 16, the old format, but yet it seems a much bigger undertaking, a bridge too far to breed consistently. Every team, the Ravens included, had inexplicable hiccups this year and Mahomes and the Chiefs struggled to find downfield plays. But their inner clock jolted them into form when the money games arrived, and also convinced them that if they’re going to lean on Steve Spagnuolo’s defense, they had to accept a new, pedestrian identity as well.

Isiah Pacheco, the zealot from Rutgers whom the Chiefs picked in the seventh round of the ‘22 draft, has scored touchdowns in all three playoff games. Kelce, who needs no introduction by now, was singled out 11 times by Mahomes and caught all 11 passes, some of them brilliantly, including the tone-setting touchdown that made it 7-0

Kelce also baited veteran Kyle Van Noy into taking an unsportsmanlike penalty, which was part of the overall distemper shown by the club that is now 1-3 in playoff games involving Jackson. Rookie receiver Zay Flowers was the chief victim of playoff hypertension. He made a 54-yard play with Jackson’s pass when he decided to shove L’Jarius Sneed to the ground and drop the football near his helmet which, in this buttoned-down age, is always a taunting penalty. That moved the Ravens back to the KC 25, and Flowers got another chance on Jackson’s pass on the left sideline. But Sneed knocked the ball out of his hands and Trent McDuffie, who has needed only two years to master his craft and who later broke up a large third-down pass to Odell Beckham Jr., recovered it in the end zone.

With 6:54 left and the Ravens only down 17-7, Jackson found himself on the Chiefs’ 25 after the Ravens had taken the ball on their own one. But Jackson threw into the most populous area of the field, and Deon Bush intercepted in the end zone. Bush is an eight-year NFL veteran who had been on the practice squad until late December, when Justin Reid was hurt. For the Chiefs, there are no empty slots on the roster; everyone has a purpose, and Bush is exactly the kind of break-glass-in-emergencies player that they hoard.

It wasn’t the best day for Jackson, who was 20 for 37 and ran for 54 yards, only six more than Brock Purdy would muster out West. But the Ravens did him no favors by refusing to impose their run game, which was top-ranked in the NFL. Gus Edwards, one of the most powerful run-finishers in the league, got three carries. The Ravens were 3-for-11 on third down and snapped the ball 57 times, to Kansas City’s 73, and their one foray into the red zone came up empty. Baltimore had run for at least 100 yards in every other game that mattered this year, and chugged for 229 against Houston last week. They had 81 against the Chiefs.

And even without linebacker William Gay to clog the middle, Kansas City limited tight ends Mark Andrews (in his comeback game from a fractured leg) and Isaiah Lively to four catches and 31 yards.

In San Francisco, the insurgent Lions was so dominant that 49ers’ coach Kyle Shanahan admitted he felt lucky to trail by only 17 at halftime. That deficit was gone in a quarter, thanks to an amazing catch by Brandon Aiyuk, a haywire fourth-down decision by Lions coach Dan Campbell, and a sloppy handoff from Jared Goff to Jahmyr Gibbs that turned into a fumble on Detroit’s 25.

The Lions was also derailed by dropped passes, as they fell behind by 10, but then clicked off a desperate touchdown drive that put them in position for an onside kick and a possible tying field goal. But onside kicks are inside straights these days, and when San Francisco recovered, Detroit could only stop the clock twice because of a very weird decision to run the ball on third-and-goal from the one. David Montgomery was tossed backwards for two yards and the Lions had to call time out with a minute left. Purdy knelt for the 34-31 victory.

Campbell is already being roasted for his two fourth-down decisions. No two are ever the same, but neither was sound. The second one came when Detroit trailed 27-24 on the 49ers’ 30, and Goff threw incomplete to Amon-Ra St. Brown on fourth-and-3. Michael Badgeley could have kicked a 48-yard field goal there for a tie.

That wasn’t good, but the worse one was in the third quarter. Detroit had held San Francisco to a field goal on its first second-half drive. On fourth-and-two from the 49ers’ 28, Josh Reynolds didn’t catch Goff’s pass. That would have been a 46-yarder for Badgeley but, more important, it would have restored Detroit’s 17-point lead.

The usual justification for such calls is that “we’ve done this all year” and “it’s who we are.” That’s fine if you’re trying to carve out an NFL beachhead, as Campbell and the Lions have, impressively. But when it comes down to the prosaic requirements of winning, or not losing, the biggest games, the process needs to be a little more nimble.

On the 49ers’ second play after that, Aiyuk went deep, Purdy’s pass hit Detroit’s Kindle Vildor in the helmet, and Aiyuk recovered to snatch it on the Lions’ six. He scored three plays later, but that one catch reminded the 49ers who they were supposed to be.

The Chiefs, through the mud of November and the familiar footing of January, never forgot.