The Chiefs squandered a potential scoring opportunity at the end of the first half of their AFC Championship Game meeting with the Bengals on Sunday.
There were five seconds left in the first half and the Chiefs had a second-and-goal opportunity from the Bengals' 1-yard line. Kansas City had no timeouts when Patrick Mahomes snapped the ball. He dumped the ball off to Hill behind the line of scrimmage instead of throwing the ball into the end-zone.
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Hill tried to make Bengals cornerback Eli Apple miss, but Apple made the strong tackle in bounds. The clock ran out on the Chiefs as a result of the play.
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Andy Reid explained what happened on the sequence during his postgame news conference. He thought that the Chiefs could run a play with five seconds left on the clock but admitted that his play call in that situation wasn't the best.
"I was hoping we could get the ball in the end zone. I probably gave them the wrong play, first of all," Reid told reporters. "I could have given him something better than that. Where the play was open in the end zone, and then we wouldn't have to go through that. I'll take responsibility for that one."
Indeed, it didn't seem like the right call. Hill had little time to get into the end zone or get out of bounds to stop the clock and allow the Chiefs one more attempt at either a touchdown or a field goal.
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Reid's play call will also call into question something that has been an issue for him during his entire coaching career: clock management. Running a play with five seconds left was certainly possible, but there was little room for error. Mahomes needed to have the wherewithal to throw the ball away instead of completing a pass outside of the end zone, which he acknowledged after the game.
"I knew that the time was low, obviously, I knew we needed to get points," Mahomes said. "We call the play that we're trying to get someone over the middle quick, and then I was probably supposed to throw the ball away. I got a little greedy there trying to get it to Tyreek and get a touchdown. They had two people out there."
That said, Mahomes still believes that playing aggressive and going for the touchdown was the right call, even if he didn't make the right throw.
"In the long run of things, [it] looks bad, but if we had another chance, I would have went for another play again," he said.
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Beyond the play call, the team's lack of timeouts also proved costly during this sequence. The Chiefs burned one early in the first quarter before electing to challenge a third-down run that had been ruled short of the first-down marker. Kansas City ultimately won the challenge, so if Reid had just thrown the flag before calling a timeout, the Chiefs would have had one more in their pocket down the stretch.
The Chiefs entered halftime with a 21-10 lead instead of extending their lead to 14 or 18 points. They ended up losing 27-24 in overtime, so even a field goal to close the half could have changed the result of the game.