Mahomes, Watson have starring roles in curtain-raiser
It’s not right to call the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans test guinea pigs, as the first NFL teams to play a game in the 2020 season.
Good gracious, they’re probably all sick of any kind of testing, after six-plus weeks of submitting themselves to daily coronavirus tests — and at least four more months of it to come, save now on game days.
But in some ways they really are lab-test creatures.
When the Chiefs and Texans kick off Thursday night (8:20 p.m. EDT, CTV and TSN via NBC) they’ll be the first NFL teams in generations to play a regular-season game without benefit of preseason warmup contests.
And the first teams to play amid all the changes brought about by new travel and game-day COVID-19 protocols, which demand that all non-players on a team sideline — including coaches, equipment folks and medical personnel — plus game officials, chain gangs and other essential on-field personnel, wear protective facewear.
And they’ll be the first NFL teams maybe ever to play in a mostly empty stadium in prime time.
It’ll also be the first time in football history that a game’s two starting quarterbacks will have just signed contract extensions worth more than half a billion dollars combined.
Yup.
Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, the Super Bowl MVP last February, in July got rewarded with a 10-year second contract worth $450 million US. That’s $590 million Cdn.
Houston’s Deshaun Watson just on the weekend signed a four-year second contract worth $156 million. Or $204 million Cdn, meaning $794 million Cdn between them.
Not bad for a couple of 24-year-olds with three NFL seasons apiece under their belts.
All the above stuff is secondary to Thursday’s game once the ball is kicked off. Then it’s just football. Yes, praise be, for the first time since the pandemic hit an NFL game really is going to be played.
Thing is, after all in-person team activities got cancelled in the spring, and after shortened training camps featuring less padded hitting between players than ever before, how close to a normal Week 1 game might we see?
“That’s maybe the unknown here,” Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said Tuesday. “There’s always different things that happen in the first game anyway, and now you add on the fact that teams weren’t able to do much in the off-season other than virtually, so I’ll be curious like you are to see how it all rolls.
“I think we can put a pretty good show on between the two teams, because of the veteran players that both teams have, and coaches. But we’ll see.”
The Chiefs won the AFC West division last year with a 12-4 record. The Chiefs’ first of three playoff wins game against the Texans, the AFC South division champ who went 10-6 in the regular season but, just to get to K.C., needed to overcome a 16-0 third-quarter deficit, plus overtime, to slip past the Buffalo Bills in the wild-card playoff round.
Eight days later the Texans stormed out to a 24-0 lead at Arrowhead Stadium by early in the second quarter, then got outscored 51-7 the rest of the way, in a 51-31 Chiefs divisional-round victory.
If any team in Week 1 doesn’t need convincing it’s not out of it should it fall behind by three scores, it’s the Texans, for sure, but the Chiefs too. Kansas City became the first team in NFL history to win all its playoff games after falling behind in each by at least two scores.
Mahomes and Watson, to be sure, are among the most exciting new quarterbacks to enter the NFL in years.
Especially Mahomes. Under Reid’s creative play-calling, the son of former Major League pitcher Pat Mahomes has set new performance and accomplishment bars at his position after two seasons of starting.
Watson can’t top that, but if he can acquire more consistency he possesses the abilities and moxie to similarly rise to a possible Hall of Fame career trajectory. Watson just needs to figure out how to play hot much more than cold — that is, as he did down the stretch in the playoff win over Buffalo, and not as he did in that miserable first half, and also as he did early in the playoff loss at Kansas City compared to thereafter.
As for the 62-year-old Reid, in February he won his first NFL championship in 22 seasons as a head coach. He’s 6-1 in openers in Kansas City, after going 7-7 in Philadelphia. Three years ago, his Chiefs blew out the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots in New England on the league’s opening Thursday night.
Has Reid discovered some kind of opening-week secret in Missouri?
“Who knows how that works, or why the record or any of that has worked?” Reid told reporters Tuesday in the universal manner that NFL interviews have been conducted since March, via video or audio conference call.
“We’re focused in on this game, and you guys are asking me a lot of questions that I don’t like to delve into, and that’s the past. Because when you do that in this business it kicks you right in the tail. So, you’ve got to move forward, and you’re only as good as your next game or play, and that’s just how it is. That’s the name of this game.”
@JohnKryk
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
