Mahomes comes home to Texas as playoff-chasing Chiefs and Cowboys meet on Thanksgiving

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Fresh off beating the Super Bowl champs, the Dallas Cowboys get the runner-up in their annual Thanksgiving home game.

It doesn’t get any easier after Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs visit Thursday with the Cowboys (5-5-1) pondering an improbable run to a playoff spot after coming off consecutive victories for the first time this season, including Sunday’s rally from 21 points down in a 24-21 victory over Philadelphia.

Some of the upcoming opponents might not look as formidable as they first did when the Dallas schedule for November and December showed six consecutive playoff teams from a year ago.

Then again, the Chiefs (6-5) fit that description because they’re outside the seven-team playoff picture just like the Cowboys. A winner of nine straight AFC West titles, Kansas City is 10th in the AFC right now — same as Dallas in the NFC.

“I don’t turn on their film and be like, ‘Man, they’re really having a bad year,’” Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer said. “I don’t think that at all. I’m like, ‘Man, he’s really fast and he’s super fast, and that guy’s fast, and that guy’s a good runner.’”

The star quarterbacks will lead the NFL’s top two passing offenses onto the Thanksgiving stage, with Dak Prescott’s Cowboys atop the league averaging 267 yards per game and him now holding the franchise record for career yards passing.

His respect for Mahomes is perfectly reflected in a meeting where both teams feel the need to come close to winning out in order to reach the postseason. The Chiefs took a big step last week with a 23-20 overtime victory over Indianapolis.

“At the end of the day, obviously, the talent jumps out, but you watch a guy who plays with pure passion, who’ll do anything it takes to win,” Prescott said of the three-time Super Bowl winner. “He’ll do anything and everything it takes.”

For the Cowboys, it probably will take at least four wins in their final six games. And even that might not be enough. First things first, though.

“There are times when your mind might go a little forward into the future and start thinking and start going all over the place,” tight end Jake Ferguson said. “And that’s where you’ve got to focus on your training. We train on how to pull our focus back into the now.”

Heading home

Mahomes grew up in East Texas and his dad, former big league pitcher Pat Mahomes Sr., was a Cowboys fan. So, naturally, the younger Mahomes caught quite a few of their games over the years.

He finally got to play at AT&T Stadium in college, when Texas Tech played Baylor, and remembers losing on a failed 2-point conversion as a freshman. The Red Raiders split his other two games against the Bears under the retractable roof.

“Just getting to play at home, having a lot of people in attendance that might not get to come to Kansas City, it’ll be really cool to experience playing there, especially on Thanksgiving,” Mahomes said, adding he’ll probably have “50-plus” friends and family in attendance.

Memory lane

Facing the Chiefs might bring some wistful moments for Schottenheimer. His dad, the late Marty Schottenheimer, led the Chiefs for 10 of his 21 years as an NFL head coach. Of the elder Schottenheimer’s 200 career wins, 101 were with KC.

Brian Schottenheimer remembers how the Hunt family, owners of the Chiefs, treated his dad after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Marty Schottenheimer died at 77 in 2021.

The younger Schottenheimer was a quarterback at Florida when the Chiefs lost their only Thanksgiving meeting against the Cowboys with his dad on the sideline in 1995. His second year as an assistant was Marty Schottenheimer’s final season as coach of the Chiefs in 1998.

“I can remember that stadium the first game my dad ever coached there (1989) … there was like 21,000 fans there,” said Schottenheimer, who is in his first season as a head coach after a quarter-century as an NFL assistant. “He turned it around. They turned it around as an organization and then it became what it is today.”

Happy Hunt-ing

Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt ran a career-high 30 times in Sunday’s win over the Colts, and having a short week to recover from that workload is hardly ideal. But he figures to get a little bit of a break with the return of Isiah Pacheco, who has missed the past three games because of a knee injury.

“He’ll play,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “How much, I can’t tell you that right now. See how it goes.”

Where’s the double team

George Pickens is working on a career year following the receiver’s offseason trade to Dallas from Pittsburgh. No one will say he has become a bigger threat than the No. 1 receiver he joined, CeeDee Lamb.

Still, he’s the one in position to post numbers similar to those from Lamb’s All-Pro season in 2023. And the highlight reel of contested sideline catches in single coverage keeps getting longer.

“If he’s one-on-one, he’s not covered. Not in my mind anyway,” Prescott said of Pickens. “And that’s not for just him. It’s for CeeDee as well. I said before, it’s not even a 50-50 ball. The favor lies in our hands.”

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AP Sports Writer Dave Skretta in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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