The Las Vegas Raiders took the Kansas City Chiefs to the final seconds of the eventual 19–17 Chiefs win on Friday, but the Chiefs’ signal-caller wasn’t thrilled with how he and his team performed in the narrow victory.

After the game, quarterback Patrick Mahomes kept a steady and unsatisfied tone when discussing the Black Friday victory. In addition to reflecting on the Chiefs’ “high standard” following another close win against an inferior team, Mahomes was asked what his biggest takeaway would be from Kansas City’s divisional win.

“Just too many mistakes at the end of the day,” Mahomes said. “I felt like there were times offensively we moved the ball — didn’t execute in the red zone, didn’t execute enough on third down
— too many mistakes. We’ve got to clean that up if we want to get to where we want to go.”

Expanding on his main takeaway, Mahomes was asked what will stand out most when he reexamines the Raiders game, leading him to reflect on missed opportunities to connect with wide receivers JuJu Smith-Schuster and Xavier Worthy for potential touchdowns.

“It’s just missed opportunities, at the end of the day,” Mahomes reiterated. “There’s going to be a lot of good — usually it’s better than you think or it’s worse than you think, but there’s going to be a lot of good on tape. We have to just find ways to execute. I mean, there was one […] on the cover-zero blitz — I hit Trav [Travis Kelce] and JuJu was wide open probably for a touchdown. There’s the one at the end of the game with Xavier. If I can just give him a chance to make a catch there, we can ice it there. He goes down at the two-yard line, we ice it. It’s just missed opportunities, and we have to execute on those opportunities if we want to get to where we want to go.”

With down-to-the-wire games like Friday’s becoming the norm for the 2024 Chiefs, is there a silver lining to the fact that KC has been able to repeatedly pull out victories late in close games?

“I think, when you look back, it keeps you hungry,” Mahomes said. “You’re not satisfied with where we’re at even though we’re winning football games, and so we know we have to get better. I think everybody in that locker room knows that we have to get better. We want to go out there and do that and prove that, so our goal is, over these last few games, is to prove [we’re] the team that we believe we really are going into the playoffs and then play like that throughout the playoffs.”