Through the Quarterback's Eyes: Patrick Mahomes

Breaking down Mahomes' 4th-and-1 TD pass to Hollywood Brown vs. the Ravens

You’re all familiar with “The Catch,” right? The Joe-Montana-to-Dwight-Clark touchdown pass in the 1981 NFC Championship Game that sent the 49ers to their first Super Bowl?

Here it is just in case you aren’t:

Many accused Montana (particularly in Dallas) of trying to throw the ball away and believe he just got lucky. After all, there’s no way a quarterback could hit his receiver that late in a play by design.

But as we all now know, the 49ers actually practiced that play quite often, and Dwight Clark sliding back to the outside was an intentional part of the concept. In fact before the play, Montana even told Clark to “be ready” as they broke the huddle.

With all great quarterbacks, almost nothing is by accident. They’re prepared to win early in the play, and they have answers late.

On Sunday against the Ravens, the Chiefs had slightly less at stake than the 49ers did in the ‘81 NFC Championship Game. But Patrick Mahomes’ 4th-and-1 touchdown pass to Hollywood Brown was a similar example of a great quarterback winning late in the play by design.

The score at the time was 30-13 with about 13-and-a-half minutes remaining. The Chiefs wanted to put the game out of reach and ensure Baltimore had no shot of coming back, as Mahomes said after the game:

“We wanted to go for it. We wanted to kind of put that final ending on the game.”

A conversion here would do just that.

First, notice the formation and the personnel. The Chiefs had wide receiver Xavier Worthy aligned in the backfield. They were hoping that the condensed formation would create traffic for whoever was responsible for Worthy to have to fight through:

Given that there were two wide receivers who could release to the right and only two DBs to that side, the Chiefs seemed to assume that safety Kyle Hamilton would be taking Worthy:

“We were talking in the huddle, and I could see that 14 (Kyle) Hamilton was gonna be on that side. So I wanted JuJu to kind of give me a little kind of a pick.”

But the Ravens would play the releases of the Chiefs’ receivers instead of playing the man. The outside defender took the outside release, negating the effects of any pick by Smith-Schuster. And that took away Worthy, Mahomes’ initial read:

Mahomes then peaked at Smith-Schuster and saw that he was still occupied with his defender. He hadn’t turned around yet:

So Mahomes had to turn to his last read, Hollywood Brown. As he said afterwards:

“We knew there was gonna be probably a cover-0 type look.”

That meant no deep safety in the middle of the field:

And so he was the last read. But I told Hollywood in the huddle, I was just like, man if it’s cover-0 man, you’ve gotta win. You’ve gotta win across the field.”

Brown was running a deep-over route. That would give him the opportunity to use his speed and run away from his defender across the field:

As Mahomes said, he needed to win his route.

“And he did that. He beat a good corner and won and was able to get a touchdown.”

It helped that Mahomes delivered an absolutely perfect throw on the run:

The touchdown put the game out of reach. Kansas City won in dominating fashion, 37-20. More importantly, the offense was clicking. Mahomes looked like the Mahomes of old, completing 25 of 37 passes for 270 yards and 4 touchdowns.

I guess the Chiefs aren’t actually done just yet…