Raphael Stevens

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    in Football

    Patrick Mahomes and Chiefs Pile Onto Jets’ Woes

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Patrick Mahomes did just about everything for the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday. He even toted Tyreek Hill back to the sideline after a touchdown catch.In near-flawless execution of coach Andy Reid’s run-pass option attack, the reigning Super Bowl M.V.P. Award winner threw for 416 yards and five touchdowns, leading the A.F.C. West-leading Chiefs to a 35-9 romp over the winless Jets.“I mean, it’s always fun to go out and score touchdowns and do all that type of stuff,” Mahomes said, “but we’ve been saying it all year long, we have a lot of ways to beat teams. Today, they did a good job of stuffing up the run. We took it to the air and threw the ball and did it that way. It’s about taking what’s there and finding ways to win.”Hill wound up with two of the touchdown catches. On the first, he celebrated by jumping into the stands and tossing the football to a fan, and Mahomes was there to help him back onto the field. On the second, Mahomes claimed to see Hill “a little banged up” and decided to carry him back to the Kansas City sideline.“Just having a little bit of fun,” Mahomes said of the ride with a wry smile. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce added 109 yards receiving and a touchdown, Mecole Hardman and Demarcus Robinson also scored, helping the Chiefs (7-1) give Andy Reid his 229th win to move into a tie with Curly Lambeau for the fifth most in N.F.L. history.Le’Veon Bell, getting a crack at the Jets just a few weeks after they released him, was held to just 7 yards rushing with three catches for another 31 yards — though it wasn’t as if Kansas City needed him.Darnold, who was without top receivers Jamison Crowder and Breshad Perriman because of injuries, was just 18-of-30 for 133 yards as the Jets fell to 0-8 for the first time since the 1996 team of Rich Kotite. “It’s obviously not where we wanted to be,” said Jets Coach Adam Gase, whose team went three-and-out on five of its first six second-half possessions and finished with 221 yards of total offense. “I’m just like everybody else from the aspect of, I’m doing this job to win, not to go out there and get my face stomped in.”The Jets next face the New England Patriots (2-5), themselves reeling from a four-game losing streak, at MetLife Stadium next Monday night.The Chiefs were astounding 19-point favorites coming into the game, and the opening series made it clear that wouldn’t be nearly enough. Mahomes was 5-of-5 for 85 yards, and he finished off the 90-yard drive with a 30-yard pass to Hardman.While the Jets answered with the first of three first-half field goals, the Chiefs kept scoring touchdowns.Mahomes threw a dart over the middle to Hill for a 36-yard touchdown on their next drive, then he flipped a nifty pass underneath the Jets coverage to Kelce for his third touchdown pass of the half and a 21-9 lead at the break.Any hope the Jets could keep building some momentum with offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains calling plays for the second straight week evaporated in the second half. They went three-and-out on four of their first three series and, when they finally picked up a first down, they promptly fumbled the ball away on their next play.Darnold took a big hit late in the game and appeared to be favoring his right shoulder, which he sprained against the Denver Broncos on Oct. 1 causing him to miss two games. Gase said the quarterback will be re-evaluated but “seems to be OK.”It wasn’t unlike last week, when the Jets managed four yards the entire second half against the Buffalo Bills.There wasn’t much lull in the Chiefs offense, though. They may have squandered a scoring chance when Bell was stopped on fourth-and-1 at the Jets’ 14-yard line, but they reached the end zone a few minutes later anyway. Mahomes hit Robinson from 26 yards out for his fourth touchdown pass, giving Kansas City a 28-9 lead late in the third quarter.Mahomes capped his big day with his second touchdown throw to Hill early in the fourth quarter. His five touchdown passes were second only to a pair of six-touchdown games he had against the Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Rams — incidentally, the Jets have four touchdown passes all season — and his yardage total was the fourth most of his career.“It’s funny, we have this whole R.P.O. thing going on and some of those runs ended up being throws,” Reid said, “but we’ll just count them as yards. I thought it was a nice job by Patrick and again, he had complete command of everything going on. More

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    in Soccer

    The Lessons of the Pirate League

    There will always be critics of a soccer super league, those who say the hurdles are too high, that it could never work. Except, of course, that one time when it did. More

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    in Soccer

    In M.L.S., the Pandemic Changes the Playoff Math

    Major League Soccer’s reworked regular season is, at last, racing to a conclusion. Many of the league’s teams have only two games left to play of this year’s truncated, 23-game schedule. Several others must squeeze in three matches in the next 11 days.The Colorado Rapids, who missed a month because of a coronavirus outbreak that affected more than a dozen players and staff members, are eight games short.And that is changing the playoff calculus.Traditionally, total points determine the standings in soccer. Every team plays the same number of games, and teams are ranked by the points they accumulate. But with the mismatch in games played in M.L.S. this year — Colorado has played only 15 games, while rivals like San Jose and Vancouver are already at 21 — the league will decide its playoff field by a different metric: points per game.“In the event that all 26 teams do not end the season with the same number of matches played,” the league’s competition rules state, qualification for the 2020 M.L.S. Cup playoffs will be determined “by points earned on a per match basis, or points per game.” (In the case of ties on that metric, goal difference — also determined on a per-game basis — will be the tiebreaker.)The difference is not merely a hypothetical one. Since it is clear that Colorado will not be able to make up all of its games before the regular season ends on Nov. 8, its playoff hopes are alive solely because points per game will be used to set the playoff field.The Rapids currently have 19 points, good for only 11th place in the West, which gets eight playoff berths this year. Under a points-per-game calculation, however, the Rapids stand eighth, at 1.27, good enough (at the moment) for a playoff spot.The Vancouver Whitecaps, who currently would be in the postseason field on points but just outside it on points per game, may have the most to lose. Vancouver has faced the additional handicap of playing its “home” games down the stretch in Portland, Ore., because of strict Canadian quarantine rules.“Don’t ask somebody from a Canadian team about if everything is balanced and fair!” Vancouver’s chief executive, Axel Schuster, told ESPN this month. “I haven’t seen my family in a month. So let us not speak if everything is balanced and everything is equal at the end.“Was everybody able to perform on the same level as everybody else? No, of course not. But I have never seen a pandemic before. I think that the only thing we can do is to go on and play and find the best solution. And to accept that the world is crazy.”There are a few other teams that will end the regular season without a full complement of results, although their deficits are much smaller than Colorado’s. The defending champion Seattle Sounders, for example, are scheduled to complete 22 of their 23 games. They stand second in the West in points, but first in points per game, and their seeding — like every other team’s — could mean the difference between a favorable matchup and a more difficult path to the league’s championship game on Dec. 12.It has been a strange season for M.L.S., which played two games to start the season, spent four months on the sideline, then played a tournament at Disney World before resuming with a shortened season.To account for the impact of an abbreviated season, M.L.S. expanded its postseason to include 10 teams from the 14-team Eastern Conference and eight from the 12-team West. More than half of those spots have been claimed to date: the Red Bulls, New York City F.C. and Los Angeles F.C. were among the half-dozen clubs that punched their tickets this week.The imbalance in the schedule could repeat itself on a much grander scale if the N.F.L. has to postpone more games because of coronavirus positives. Many N.F.L. teams have little flexibility after using their bye weeks, and teams playing 14 or 15 games instead of 16 has become a possibility. The league has considered adding an 18th week to its schedule to account for makeup games, but for now that remains only an option.This year’s Women’s Super League in England faced a similar problem in the spring when its season was abruptly halted by the coronavirus. The league opted to decide its champion by points per game, meaning Chelsea won the title, despite having fewer total points than Manchester City, an outcome that City accepted far more readily than its fans did. More