Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid met with the media over Zoom conference call Monday, 12 hours after the team’s 22-16 win over the Denver Broncos.
Watch the full presser above or by clicking here. Here were the most significant takeaways:
Having a wide receiver who didn’t know he caught a ball was a new experience for Reid.
Many fans have seen the play by now — Patrick Mahomes threw a 40-yard pass to wide receiver Tyreek Hill, who snatched the ball off a deflection while on the ground in the end zone early in the second quarter. The referee ruled it incomplete, and Hill assumed the ball hit the grass before landing in his lap.
Reid called for the punt team, never thinking to challenge the play.
“I met with a few of the people here on that situation and how we might be able to not have that happen again,” explained Reid in Monday’s opening statement. “That’s my responsibility there. I mentioned to you kind of how it went down yesterday, and so our people upstairs got the feed as fast as they possibly could up on the board and to the box, and it just wasn’t quite in time to take a review of it before we had to punt. But that’s no fault of theirs, and it’s one of those things. I always check with the player, and I mentioned that’s the first time I ever had a player tell me that he didn’t catch it and he did catch it. So, I’ll put that one into the learning category for me on that.”
Reid was asked to elaborate on what went might have gone wrong in the process.
“We have an in-house feed that gets there a tick sooner. You see it on the scoreboard. What you saw on the scoreboard, was what we saw on the feed, it was all the same. Now, there’s some restrictions on that. They’ve got league restrictions that you’ve got to abide by in certain situations. They got it up as fast as they could get it up. They’ve got a couple legs they have to go through before they present it to you. It just timed up; it was a weird deal. We really haven’t had that problem. We’ve been pretty good with it. This was unique.
“I’m sitting there in real-time, giving you my thought on it, I’ve never had a player tell me he didn’t get it, he said, ‘I jumped too soon. I didn’t get it. I dropped it.’ So, I go, ‘All right.’ Then all of a sudden, there’s a chance that he actually caught the ball. I just kind of watched the official’s reaction, I did this on tape afterwards, but the official’s reaction to it and he sensed something because he did a little shuffle to the left to see if he could get in better position. Even he, I think was fooled by it too, obviously. That’s kind of what you do. Normally, they’re going to get it up there as fast as they can get it up there within whatever guidelines are given to them in situations and we go from there.”
Reid was asked why defensive tackle Khalen Saunders has been a healthy scratch for the last five weeks.
The 2019 third-round pick spent some time on injured reserve with a dislocated elbow early during the 2020 season. Reid acknowledged that while the injury has factored in, so too has the play of other tackles such as Derrick Nnandi, Mike Pennel and Turk Wharton.
“Some of the other guys that have been in there have done OK,” mentioned Reid. “You put one up, you’ve got to put one down. That’s one of the negatives of when you get injured. Somebody steps in and does pretty good, then that’s what goes on. He’s definitely a good football player and his time will come here.”
Reid noted he does not have to necessarily remind Chiefs about the idea that they can be beat on any given Sunday.
The Cleveland Browns defeated the Tennessee Titans, the New York Giants beat the Seattle Seahawks, and the winless New York Jets nearly knocked off the Las Vegas Raiders in Sunday’s other NFL games.
“These guys don’t miss a beat; I mean they know what’s going on,” Reid said of his Chiefs players. “Those phones sometimes I think are attached to their hands, so they know. They’re as bad as you guys are with those sons of guns man, they can maneuver around the world with those phones, so they know and they’re reminded about it, yes but have a pretty good idea.
“I try to focus on things that we can control and try to stay strong with that, how we practice, how we work different situations – situational football is so important, turnovers are so important that we eliminate them on offense and create them on defense, playing four quarters of aggressive football is something we try to focus on and those things become the most important things. Those are the things you can control and so I think you’re better off going there than the threats of ‘this can happen to you.’”
With all the talk of “letting Russ cook” early this season, a reporter questioned Reid about “letting Patrick cook.”
Reid did not shy away from a lighthearted opportunity.
“Well he’s doing pretty good, I think. Every week you guys ask me about a record here or there, so I think he’s cooking pretty good. I’d like to eat some of the stuff that he’s cooking if we’re going analogies here because it looks like it’s pretty good. I think he’s OK; I mean we got enough going here it think and it is the NFL and there’s great competition.
“Things happen and we’re close to 500 yards a game and I’m not a big liver guy I’m not going to tell you it’s not chopped liver, but we can do a little bit better in spots.”