Chiefs are (probably) another team going through a playbook overhaul

To me, the Houston Texans offense will be worth following for the next decade or so since the Kansas City Chiefs opted for Patrick Mahomes at pick No. 10 of the 2017 NFL Draft instead of Deshaun Watson, who the Texans selected at pick No. 12.

It is the reason why Eli Manning, Philip Rivers and Ben Roethlisberger (‘04 draft class) are forever connected and compared and probably the reason you can add the Bears’ Mitchell Trubisky (pick No. 2) to the mix of Mahomes and Watson.

With that being said, I noticed the fact that the Houston Texans are completely changing their offense for the 2018 season made some headlines Thursday morning.

Here were the comments from Texans head coach Bill O’ Brien, via NFL Network:

“We have to build it up again, start building a new offense. Our offense is totally different now from what it was ... All these teams, especially in our division, have watched all those plays. They’re studying those things, and we have to start from scratch.”

While this is a practice head coach Andy Reid does every year—reinventing the playbook—it already seems like it will be more so this year with the installment of new quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

I don’t know if I would use the words “start from scratch,” but Mahomes and Sammy Watkins will probably call for vastly different offensive looks than that of Alex Smith and Albert Wilson.

Reid explained what he did with Smith when it came to the playbook earlier this month.

“I went back and looked at all of his college stuff and tried to pull out things which he really hadn’t had at the NFL level,” Reid said. “I pulled out things that he was comfortable with and I talked to Alex about it. What he felt he was comfortable with and we molded that offense around him.”

Reid then did the same thing (on a smaller scale) with Mahomes for Week 17. Our own Seth Keysor recorded that of Mahomes’ snaps, 44 of them came from a spread look, or 75.9 percent.

“For that game, we molded that game plan around [Mahomes],” Reid said. “Mike Kafka spent a lot of time with him when everybody else was kind of working on the playoff game. We were able to get in there and kind of mold it with what we had in the package at that time, mold it around him.

“We didn’t put a lot of new in because we had a lot of young guys playing around him. He didn’t have the whole cast there.”

With five more months to spare, I do expect a lot of new.

This hybrid-Air Reid-spread-Mahomes-special offense featuring Watkins, Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce is going to be something to watch.

We have time to work on the name.