Alex Smith

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Don't look now, but Alex Smith is a pretty good QB

 

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KANSAS CITY — Maybe it’s a coincidence, the locals say, but did you know the Chiefs haven’t lost a game since the Royals made it to the World Series? That’s one of many ways to explain the drastic turnaround of the Chiefs’ season. But the most pertinent explanation has nothing to with destiny or chance—it’s how the trust of Andy Reid enabled Alex Smith to dig the team out of its early-season hole.

To tell that story, let’s start by discussing one play. There were 36 seconds until halftime of the Chiefs’ Week 16 game against Cleveland, the ninth win of their 10-game streak to close out the season, and the one that, as improbable as it would have seemed in mid-October, earned them a bid to the postseason.

In the red zone, the Chiefs called one of their bread-and-****er plays. They were in a 3 x 1 set, with receivers Jeremy Maclin, Jason Avant and Albert Wilson bunched to the left side of the formation, and tight end Travis Kelce the lone player to the right side. Kelce was supposed to run a corner route, but as Smith was preparing to take the shotgun snap, he didn’t like what he saw. The cornerback on that side, Tramon Williams, had outside leverage, so it would be hard for Kelce to get open on a route that veered to the outside. But the free safety over the top, Donte Whitner, was cheating slightly toward the three-receiver side.

Standing over the line of scrimmage, Smith turned toward Kelce and gave him a verbal cue—“he yelled at me,” Kelce says, smirking—to convert his route to a post. Kelce took off running, planted hard with his right foot to make the cornerback think he was going outside, then angled in toward the goalpost, right into the open void in the defense that Smith had anticipated. Touchdown.

On a very micro level, this is how the Chiefs turned around their season. The team was at a crossroads, falling to 1-5 and losing its top offensive weapon, running back Jamaal Charles. So to get out of it, they tapped into one of their most valuable assets: Alex Smith’s brain, giving the veteran more freedom to change protections, runs and routes at the line. For as many great quarterbacks as Reid has coached in his West Coast system—as Brett Favre’s quarterbacks coach in Green Bay, and in Philadelphia with Donovan McNabb—none has been given as much freedom as Smith has this season.

“We didn’t do those types of checks with Brett, no,” says Doug Pederson, Favre’s backup in Green Bay and the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator. “The game’s changed a little bit since then. Defenses have changed. But it’s funny, because I think Alex has changed Andy a little bit.”

The labels that have followed Smith through his 11-year NFL career are largely dubious ones: Game manager. A guy you can “get by” with. But in Kansas City, it’s hard to imagine the Chiefs would still be playing football in January without him.

How Alex Smith and the Chiefs turned their season around | The MMQB with Peter King

 

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  Andy Reid said that this was the first time in his career that he gave the quarterback the power to change the call at the line of scrimmage if what he sees he doesn't like: Fox: How Chiefs went from 1-5 to the playoffs
  
  I'm not calling Smith elite or anything, but it pays to have a smart quarterback. There article claims that not even McNabb had that freedom and it didn't start until the Pittsburgh game this year for Smith. McNabb is the type of person in the media to refute this, so I fully expect him to say that he had the keys to the car and changed plays all the time, too.

 

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The big Alex Smith review