After the Texans lost to the Chiefs in the divisional round of the playoffs, their head coach DeMeco Ryans and players from the team made comments about having to play against both the Chiefs and the officials.
The Chiefs are middle of the league in penalties accepted. Fun fact: The Bills, by the numbers, get more calls than KC does.
These coaches, and fans, need to get off social media. Payton lost because he got outcoached and the Chiefs are a better team, same with the Texans. He should be focusing on improving on special teams, who gave up a blocked field goal that clinched the game for KC. Houston should focus on their o-line, which gave up eight sacks to the Chiefs D-line and kicked Joe Mixon’s ass the entire game.
This narrative of Chiefs bias is the algorithm keeping your eyes glued to nonsense so they can feed you more ads.
The Chiefs are just better than your team. That’s it.
(Though it is ironic that a proven and punished cheater like Sean Payton is the one making these complaints after he paid his players to lay dirty hits.)
While I’m not exactly rooting for it, I do think if someone actually roughed mahomes it would probably stop some of the flags. There’s no incentive to hold back if it’s a flag either way.
I’ll root for it, especially with his tendency to slow down when running out of bounds in order to try to draw a flag. I bet if he got absolutely trucked enough times he’d cut that shit out.
You’re trying to win games, though, and purposely giving up 15 yards is not conducive to that.
What they really ought to do is reassess how QBs are protected. Make it clear that they lose special protections if they slide late, or slow down to create contact. And give the defender some leeway. I have seen fouls called when the defender was clearly aiming away from the head and the runner put his head in the way. Only from QBs though, looking to slide late to draw the foul.
AFAIK, the rulebook doesn’t make a distinction between a QB or any other player once they are a runner, but we all know that hits to QBs are more likely to draw flags, because nobody wants to see the backup QB in a big game.