Here’s Patrick Mahomes planting his back foot and putting his hips into a throw that will span half the football field. And, oh boy, the other end is a rare sight: Marquez Valdes-Scantling has three yards on the last Eagles defender.

A short while earlier, here’s Mahomes on a third down turning to his right. And, man, he has to be pleased with what he sees: Justin Watson has two steps on Philadelphia cornerback James Bradberry.

A short while earlier still, here’s Mahomes immediately recognizing a blitz and throwing deep along the sideline. And you wouldn’t believe it, but there it is again: Valdes-Scantling is behind every member of the Eagles’ secondary.

Incomplete.

Incomplete.

Incomplete.

The Eagles beat the Chiefs 21-17 on Monday Night Football, and the reasoning is such an unusual sentence that it feels strange to type.

The Eagles didn’t just let a few receivers slip open downfield. They dared Mahomes and the Chiefs to beat them downfield — and then strutted out of GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium with a win because of it.

A Chiefs offense quarterbacked by Patrick Mahomes and coached by Andy Reid is among the most frustrating, agonizing and just plain hard to watch in all of football right now. The Chiefs are the very worst second-half team in the league. They haven’t scored a point after halftime in a month.

We’re left to an all-too-familiar conversation, trying to diagnose how fixable (or not) their struggles might be. But for an entirely new reason.

A more worrisome reason.

The Chiefs have snapped into one of the league’s worst teams throwing the deep ball — and after a rainy Monday night, there ain’t an excuse left in the Rolodex for it.

For weeks — nay, months — I’ve talked about it and asked about it, and the response is consistent. That’s just the way defenses are playing the Chiefs. And you know what? That rationale had some legitimacy.

Had.

The “defenses won’t let us do it” excuse was buried in the grass somewhere around the west end zone on Monday night.

The Eagles determined Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco was too much of a first-half problem. So the team with Mahomes in shotgun watched an opposing defense do all it could to stop, um, the running game. I mean this with truly no disrespect to Pacheco, who was outstanding Monday, but there was a time quite recently when turning your attention from Mahomes to Pacheco would have been like turning off a Martin Scorsese film because cable TV is replaying the movie Air Bud.

Hasn’t this been the dream for the Chiefs’ offense? To have the chance to take some shots downfield?

Yet in the latest version of how-to-shut-out-the-Chiefs-after-halftime, the Eagles bet the Chiefs couldn’t connect downfield. And then they left Kansas City with a bag.

“They came up, and they forced us to throw the football,” Mahomes said. “We didn’t answer the bell.”

Listen, the Eagles are terrific. Best record in the NFL. But if that quote does not accurately paint the low point for the 2023 offense — and let’s be clear this is strictly about the offense — we should fear what awaits.

The downfield shots have long been what teams fear and guard against most, and the Eagles instead gift-wrapped the Chiefs a few opportunities. Forget the deep shells. The Eagles frequently moved members of their secondary closer to the line of scrimmage, and basically threw just about everyone else toward tight end Travis Kelce on intermediate routes.

And they held the Chiefs off the scoreboard.

The other commonality in those three plays, the missed connections that lead this column? Kelce had multiple defenders on him.

The receivers did not. They were left in one-man-to-beat spots. They won. Well, kind of.

The play that occupied the first paragraph of this column is the one you’ll see on replays for days. Valdes-Scantling, brought in to execute precisely this kind of route, had the ball in his hands and finished with those hands slapping the grass in the end zone. A 51-yard score, on the back of a perfect throw, would’ve supplied the Chiefs a lead in the final two minutes. Instead, it provided a perfectly fitting image.

The plays that occupied the second and third paragraphs of this column were more aligned with the storyline we’ve followed closely throughout the season. Receiver breaks one way because that’s what the route calls. Quarterback anticipates another because he sees what’s so clearly an opening.

“You can’t miss those shots,” Mahomes said.

The primary problem is it’s an ongoing problem. If it weren’t, we could perhaps chalk it up to a bad night. But they have been missing those shots with regularity. These just happened to cost them a game. Mahomes has completed just 12 of 40 attempts of 20-plus yards this season after an 0-for-4 Monday, all in the second half.

He has his lowest completion percentage, completions per game, yards per game and touchdowns per game, along with his most interceptions per game, on deep throws for his career. He has the second-worst passer rating on those shots in the entire NFL.

A reminder: Those are Patrick Mahomes’ stats, but I must mention that his receivers most certainly haven’t done him favors. If he were to take all responsibility for Monday, we’d be asking him to catch his own throws or move a receiver to the open part of the field. Few involved, actually, can refuse blame for what transpired.

Or anything that continues to transpire with offense.

The Chiefs defense is playing as well as it has in memory, a fact unaltered by the outcome against Philadelphia. They were terrific once more. That’s not irrelevant in the big-picture for a team with Super Bowl aspirations.

But we’re left to talk about the other side — the one with work to do if those aspirations have merit. Overall, the Chiefs finished at 4.5 yards per play Monday, their lowest such mark of the season. It’s their fifth time this year finishing below 5.25 yards per play, and that’s not a number I picked out of thin air — that was their lowest mark in all of 2022.

Half of their games have been worse.

On the other end of a bye week, in a game in which their anticipated top option finally looked healthy, the Chiefs’ offense did not subtract any worry.

They added yet another reason for it.

This story was originally published November 21, 2023, 5:30 AM.