The B-Gap: The defining battle of Super Bowl 57: Patrick Mahomes vs. the Eagles defensive line

By Sam Robb O’Hagan

Patrick Mahomes is great at everything. 

Five AFC Championships, two Super Bowl appearances, two MVPs and one Super Bowl speak for themselves, of course, but the ubiquitousness of Mahomes’ greatness is the first of its kind.

His superpower — if there has to be just one — is that there isn’t a weakness in his game that an opponent can key in on, no weakest link for him to only be as strong as. He’s a jack of all trades, master of all, and there’s just about nothing that anyone can do about it.

But if there’s one of Mahomes’ strengths that stands above the rest, one extra-extraordinary quality among an endless line of extraordinary qualities, it’s that it’s next to impossible to sack him.

Consider this: In Mahomes’ five seasons as the Kansas City Chiefs’ starting quarterback, he has yet to take more than 30 sacks in a single season, has yet to finish as one of the NFL’s 20 most sacked quarterbacks, and the Chiefs have yet to finish outside of the NFL’s six-lowest adjusted sack rates — a metric that accounts for the volume of passing plays an offense runs.

Those numbers are remarkable for a player who, among plenty of other things, ascended to superstardom because of his jaw-dropping creativity out of structure. Mahomes doesn’t let plays die and has unwavering belief in his improvisation — the NFL’s social media accounts have basically made a living off of highlights of Mahomes running around endlessly behind the line of scrimmage before somehow finding a receiver downfield — and yet, despite all of the inevitable risk that comes with that style of play, he’s basically never sacked.

To understand just how rare it is for a player that plays like Mahomes does to be sacked as scarcely as Mahomes is, consider Chicago Bears quarterback Justin Fields. Fields has kept his head above water in the NFL almost exclusively because of his production as a scrambler — see his 61-yard touchdown run against the Miami Dolphins earlier this year — but he’s paid a hefty price for that style of play. Fields has been sacked 91 times in 27 games in two years as a starter, and the Bears have finished with the highest adjusted sack rate in the entire league in each of the last two seasons.

Fields’ 91 career sacks are only 30 sacks behind Mahomes, despite Mahomes playing over 50 more games in 3 more seasons as a starting quarterback.

These numbers are especially important when you consider that, contrary to popular belief, sacks are very much a stat that quarterbacks are responsible for. Offensive lines are responsible for preventing pressure, for maintaining clean pockets and keeping the picture clean long enough for their quarterback to execute whatever passing concept is dialed up.

But it’s the quarterbacks themselves that are responsible for ensuring that when their offensive line does surrender pressure, it doesn’t turn into sacks, those critical negative plays that can derail drives.

That’s what Mahomes does so especially well; not only does he create positive plays out of structure like few others in the history of the sport, but he never surrenders negative plays either, relentlessly keeping the Chiefs’ offense on schedule.

Getting caught up in the more directly tangible magic of Mahomes’ game is easy; those no-look passes, those bombs down the field that appear so hopelessly mindless but are somehow so perfectly precise. But his astonishing volume of positive output is so historically impressive only when the volume of his negative output is considered, too — in that it basically doesn’t exist. For everything he does so well, he does almost nothing wrong.

For opposing defenses, it’s already an impossible struggle just to slow him down, let alone actively stop him, but to push him back? To fully take the wind out of his sails and point his arrow in the other direction? To sack him? Mahomes doesn’t let it happen, and it’s that that makes him so stupidly good.

However.

If there was ever a defense to do it — and there very well may simply not be one at all — it’s this one.

The Philadelphia Eagles defense, like Mahomes, does just about everything well, but one number stands out among the rest.

70 — for the number of sacks the Eagles recorded in the regular season, just the fourth team in NFL history to reach it. If they sack Mahomes five times on Sunday, which only the 2018 Cardinals have done over his five-season career as a starter, the 2022 Eagles will be the very first team to reach 83 sacks in the regular season and the playoffs combined. 

The Eagles defense’s adjusted sack rate of 11.2 percent is the highest since the 2000 New Orleans Saints, and just the second mark of over 11 percent since Football Outsiders started tracking the stat in 1996.

But the Eagles don’t just finish pressures with sacks at an astonishing rate. Jonathan Gannon’s defense generates pressure itself with the best of them, too. Philadelphia’s defense led the league in ESPN’s pass-rush win rate metric at 52 percent, and both of the Eagles’ starting edge rushers — Hasson Reddick and Josh Sweat — finished top 10 in individual pass-rush win rate at their position.  

Philly’s defense is excellent in several different areas, but its defensive line is its engine room; its home run hitter and closer all in one. They win fast and often, immediately disrupting the integrity of opposing offenses. When they do win, they finish the play with a sack, leaving no room for improvisation for opposing quarterbacks. If they beat you, and they will beat you, it’s game over.

That’s what the Eagles defense does so incredibly well, and it’s so remarkably rare. They make things happen themselves, they turn production into actual output, and they finish what they started.

In what is shaping up to be one of the closest Super Bowls in recent history, between the two teams that have led the way since the first week of the season, there will be no shortage of critical matchups to consider.

That’s what makes the Eagles defense, and Mahomes, so historically special. They excel everywhere, they can win — and have won — in so many different ways that it’s almost impossible to stop them. This is the unstoppable force against the immovable object, the pinnacle of a cliche that will live on in the NFL forever.

Something has to give, and in a sport that is still dominated by two pillars — quarterback and trench-play — you’d be hard-pressed to find a more obvious pressure point, a more impactful point of inflection, than how clean Patrick Mahomes can keep his jersey.