And the root of the effort Spanuolo got from his guys, they swear, starts with the relationship they all share with him.
He trusts them. They trust him. It showed in how he game planned Lamar Jackson and Baltimore’s unique, tough-to-handle offense, and in how they beat Josh Allen and Tua Tagovailoa the past two weeks, too. But it’s also not something that’s built overnight.
And Trent McDuffie could point to his own bond with Spagnuolo as a testament.
“I don’t know if anybody knows the story, but last year, I was injured for seven weeks,” McDuffie says in a cleared-out locker room an hour after the game. “I remember, our bye week, he called me into the office. And he was like, . And, for me, that was like one of those moments where I was like, He cared about my body, he cared about my mentality.
“He is one of those dudes who has so much love for you, you just gotta reciprocate it. The respect that he has in the building, as a man, as a coach, that’s why this defense really plays for him.”
They sure did Sunday.
We’ll rightfully talk about the spectacular Patrick Mahomes in the aftermath of the Chiefs’ 17–10 win over the favored and top-seeded Ravens in the AFC title game, a win that gave Kansas City its fourth conference title in five years. Travis Kelce deserves credit, too, for summoning what he has through the playoffs after a wobbly regular season, and Marquez Valdes-Scantling’s game-ending redemption is another fun element to all of this.
But this Sunday, in a vacuum, was really about the same thing it was last week against the Buffalo Bills, and what the week before was against the Miami Dolphins: Making a quarterback, no matter how good, feel like a fish out of water with all it can throw at an offense. And just like Tagovailoa and Allen before him, Lamar Jackson was that fish on dryland, feeling the brunt of a group that relentlessly pursued him—holding the MVP-to-be to a 75.5 passer rating, 272 passing yards (97 of them coming in catch-up mode in the fourth quarter), and 54 yards on the ground.
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In some moments, it was about how the Chiefs’ defense strangled the life out of Baltimore’s run game by sending run blitzes. In others, it was how resourceful the group was when everything wasn’t working—with one turnover on the goal line and another on the end zone. Above all else, though, it was just how much Spagnuolo and KC could do with a smart, talented group of players that allowed for its leader to coach with an open playbook.
“I’ve been trying to explain to people what we have,” Spagnuolo told me in the tunnel by the buses. “This is the highest number of defensive players with high intelligence with football I’ve had, and they’re really passionate. I’ve had really smart players before. Tyrann Mathieu and Anthony Hitchens. We’ve had a lot of smart people, but the amount of them now is unbelievable. Trent , LJ [L’Jarius Sneed], Nick [Bolton], Dru [Tranquill], Leo [Chanel].
“And they all love to play. Everybody has a guy that doesn’t get it, that makes all the mistakes. We don’t have any of those guys. That makes all the difference in the world.”
The plan Sunday boiled down to sending extra rushers, and doing it from all angles.
That doesn’t work, of course, unless Spagnuolo and his defensive staff could trust the guys on the back end—and so the presence of perhaps the NFL’s top corner tandem, in Sneed and McDuffie (“We the best duo in the league,” Sneed told me, “It’s proven), provided the foundation for the blueprint that the staff drew up.
“Yeah, we had confidence on the back end that we can match up on them in man coverage,” safety Justin Reid says. “We didn’t want to be comfortable because he’s such a dynamic athlete. You let him have the ball in his hands [for] too much time, he’s going to do something special with it. So we tried to speed up his clock a little bit, send some pressure after him, see if we can get him off rhythm and just make sure that we locked up on the back end.”
And that worked for nearly three quarters—with the Chiefs up 17–7 as the Ravens took possession with 49 seconds left in the third quarter from their own 36.
From there, cracks would show. But so would the Ravens’ resolve.
A coverage bust sprung Baltimore rookie Zay Flowers free for 54 yards on the first play of the aforementioned possession. And four plays later, Sneed chased Flowers down and popped the ball free at the goal line, with McDuffie covering it in the end zone to preserve the 10-point lead. “I saw him stretch the ball out—I knew he would do that,” Sneed says. “So I just reached my hand out and punched at the ball.”
The Ravens’ next possession started with similar promise, and ended with another implosion, with Jackson throwing the ball into triple coverage and reserve safety Deon Bush fielding the ball like a punt in the end zone.
“We came down with it,” McDuffie says. “And I feel like that was the first time that I was like, . For me, as a DB, that was a play where I was like, ’”
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And in the process of all this, Spagnuolo tweaked the original plan, doubling down on blitzing Jackson, something, again, that only deepened the gamble he was taking that his guys would be up to the task.
“I don’t think four guys can control him,” says Spagnuolo of Jackson. “He’s just too good. When we did throw four at him later, he kept getting out of it. We got to him with more than four, and that’s the reason for doing it. … And we decided instead of playing our normal red-zone coverages to blitz a little bit more. That’s really what happened.”
On the Ravens’ last possession, it forced Jackson to unload the ball fast and in the middle of the field, bleeding the clock, then stalled Baltimore out at the Kansas City 25. By then, there was just 2:38 left. Justin Tucker kicked a field goal to make it 17–10, but Mahomes and the Chiefs’ offense did the rest.
By then, it was clear how this one was won—behind Spags and his guys.
“All season,” Andy Reid says in a quiet moment in the tunnel, “Spags has been phenomenal.”
Those T-shirts? Spagnuolo, for the record, didn’t like them.
“No,” he said, smiling, “that was embarrassing.”
But they did say it all—in Spags, these Chiefs trust.
