KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The breaking point of the Chiefs’ season came a week before they were eliminated from playoff contention, and a week before quarterback Patrick Mahomes suffered a knee injury that will now occupy his offseason.

A frayed year broke for good on a Sunday night inside GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, on the most aggressive decision of head coach Andy Reid’s 13-year tenure in Kansas City.

He left the offense on the field — left the offense on their own half of the field — for a fourth down against the Texans. The Chiefs didn’t get it, and the Texans pounced. The Texans were playing football into January, and the Chiefs were done.

Reid’s rationale for going for it derived from the question he frequently asks himself when confronted with these fourth-down decisions: Is there a call on the sheet he likes?

There was.

Or there used to be, anyway.

Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes dropped back to throw on fourth-and-short, but the Texans covered his primary target out of the backfield. They covered the first crossing pattern. They covered the second. The first, second and third reads, gone.

It was almost as though the Texans knew what was coming.

Did they?

It’s mid-January now, and for the first time since January 2018, the NFL’s conference championship weekend requires talking about a Chiefs season in the past tense. The analysis of why they’re sitting at home could be a list, and a long one at that.

But there is nothing more significant than this: The Chiefs collapsed in fourth quarters, time and time again. In their eight losses before Mahomes suffered the season-ending knee injury, the Chiefs either led in the fourth quarter or possessed the ball with a chance to tie or take the lead in the fourth quarter.

They had a better-than-50% win probability at some point in the fourth quarter of six of those eight losses. It took real work to go 6-11, including 6-8 with Mahomes at quarterback.

Mahomes finished 36th out of 38 qualifying quarterbacks in fourth-quarter completion percentage. That’s behind Shedeur Sanders and Dillon Gabriel. Behind J.J. McCarthy and Spencer Rattler.

How? How can Mahomes rank that poorly in any quarterback statistic? How is it possible a team that built a dynasty on its ability to win close games suddenly lost the magic?

That reverts to that Texans play, and the question that followed it.

Did the Texans know what was coming? Had they seen the trick one too many times?

“I think the one part of having so much success is teams watch a lot of film on you,” Mahomes said. “So we try to have good game plans of how to combat what (they) do and what (we’ve) done well.

“You saw that this year — teams were very conscious of the plays that we’ve hit for a long time.”

It’s a long, detailed reply that for the relevance in this column could be boiled down to one word:

Yes.

The Texans perhaps knew what was coming.

But not just them. Heck, a week later, the Chargers safeties played as though they were in the Chiefs’ third-down huddles. They crashed on routes to the point of injuring Chiefs wide receivers.

So in an offseason that will offer the Chiefs more time to evaluate their problems than any other in the Mahomes era, what do they need to fix most?

This.

Mahomes nailed the root of why they’ve struggled late in games, articulated in a manner he refrained from saying during the season. Their film is out there. If the Chiefs have participated in the AFC championship game in seven straight seasons, it would be malpractice not to study it. It’s working. Nobody is spending their offseason trying to figure out the tendencies of the Las Vegas Raiders’ offense.

But Mahomes also nailed the root of what must change — their predictability.

The Chiefs haven’t suddenly forgotten how to run offense. They don’t lack smart minds. They didn’t suddenly stop running the good plays, either.

Rather, the opposition has begun to know when to expect the good plays — and, more specifically, what to expect from the Chiefs in the big moments. Think of the advantage that provides a defense.

It’s the very advantage they must reverse.

That’s going to require innovation, and require a departure from believing the things they have done will just keep on working.

The Chiefs have hired Eric Bieniemy as offensive coordinator after a two-year absence. But they brought him back more because of what he was already providing — an attention to detail — rather than to lead an offensive makeover.

Which means that Reid needs to lead the charge on innovation, even if the room offers some collaboration.

It’s not necessarily stubbornness that prompted the Chiefs to fall behind on their go-to plays in big moments. It’s success, really. It’s not as though dancing with the plays that brought you to the dance lacks logic.

But 6-11 has a way of slapping you in the face.

It’s up to the Chiefs how long they feel the sting.

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