IT’S A PATRICK MAHOMES WORLD — AND WE’RE LUCKY TO BEAR WITNESS
Watching him survive a bum ankle is the norm, and when he led the Kansas City Chiefs to their second Super Bowl title in four years, it fed the delicious prospect that he’s starting the hunt for Brady
If the Super Bowl is an immersive experience, we are left to ask if Patrick Mahomes is an invention of artificial intelligence. Or something that involves virtual-reality goggles, or hallucinogens, and enables him to lead a football revolution on a re-aggravated bum ankle when the rest of us need all working body parts just to get through life.
In a game that left us satiated and exhausted, showcasing the breakneck thrills of a league that produces entertainment on demand, it was Mahomes who had the ball last on Sunday night. That meant he was going to win, outdueling Jalen Hurts in a memorable battle of modern-day quarterbacking and slapping an exclamation point on one of the NFL’s most decorated individual seasons. Go ahead and shout me down in Philadelphia, where cruder rowdies are looking up home addresses of the officiating crew that called defensive holding in the final two minutes, allowing Mahomes to drain the clock until the winning field goal gave the Kansas City Chiefs their second championship in four years.
But while the call will be debated amid cheesesteak indigestion — though James Bradberry did admit he tugged the jersey of Kansas City’s JuJu Smith-Schuster on 3rd-and-8 with 1:48 left — there’s a bigger reason the Eagles lost and Mahomes became the seventh player to win a Super Bowl, the league MVP award and the Super Bowl MVP award in the same season. The Chiefs scored three touchdowns and a field goal in their only second-half possessions and, somehow, managed to slow Hurts when necessary even after he’d delivered hurts all night with his arm and legs. Once again, in no small thanks to an offensive line that stymied the enemy’s celebrated pass rush, they rode the inspirational limping, gimping and giddy-upping of Mahomes. He survived to win his second championship at age 27 — leaving him five shy of Tom Brady, who needed 43 years to win seven, for those already counting — after his sprained right ankle was twisted like a corkscrew in the second quarter.
“I told y’all, nothing was gonna keep me off that football field,” he said, grinning like the overgrown kid he is, a 38-35 comeback victory added to a blooming legacy fed by three touchdown passes. “When you have those high ankle sprains, you always re-aggravate them. I was able to battle through. Oh, yeah, I was going to push it. I challenged the guys: Leave everything you have on that field, and if I’m going to challenge you, I’m going to do the same.”
“He’s the MVP. The MVP. That’s all that needs to be said,” said Andy Reid, the coach who created the Mahomes monster. “And you saw it tonight.”
And if he can win two after five seasons as a starter, well, Mahomes has done the math. “Lucky for me, I’ve got Tom Brady to chase,” he said. “Maybe one day, we’ll be talking about going for an eighth championship.”
If he’s ever allowed two healthy ankles, isn’t anything possible?
Officially now, America is back from its peak-pandemic gloom, gathering in record viewership numbers to laugh at dancing animals in $7 million ads, see Rihanna perform with a baby bump at intermission and, I almost forgot, watch the championship game. If the 57th Super Bowl hailed a nation’s perseverance after rough times, how fitting that Mahomes ignored his agony again — with uncommon daring, creativity and pressure playmaking — and continued to carve his initials into sports lore. As if daring a defender to mess with an ankle diagnosed as a high sprain three weeks earlier, sure enough, linebacker T.J. Edwards tackled him around the lower leg in the open field and left him in severe pain on the bench.
Was it a dirty hit? An all’s-fair-in-football play in February? In a scene we’ve witnessed repeatedly this postseason, Mahomes screamed and writhed. Was this the blow that finally would put him away? Not only that, the field was slippery, as it always is at State Farm Stadium, where sod is wheeled in on trays and an $18-billion-a-year league can’t figure out a better way. Would he slip, as he did when trying to make a cut, and further exacerbate the sprain? Mahomes is a human being, after all, with a wife and two children as proof.
Ha. It was just another devilish set-up in a series of career sequences with the same conclusion. Never, ever doubt this man. “I couldn’t cut,” he said, “so I just ran straight ahead.” Or he threw to his partner in championship crime, Travis Kelce, more reliable in the heartland than a barbecue platter.
“I knew it was pretty bad when he got up limping, but I knew it wasn’t gonna be bad enough to where he was gonna pull himself off the field,” said Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who called a great game for Mahomes when Reid will get the credit. “If we would’ve pulled him off, I would’ve had to fight him. He would’ve probably fought me. So it wasn’t worth entertaining.”
For the longest time, in a game that didn’t start until 6:44 p.m. ET after a torturously long Fox pregame show held us all hostage, it seemed Hurts would upstage Mahomes. Here was the quarterback who was pulled from a national championship game at Alabama, a moment that could have sent him spiraling in life. Instead, he transferred, waited 53 picks until he was taken in the second round of the 2020 draft, then waited out rumors that the Eagles would trade for Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson before ever making him the firm starter. Now, five years after Nick Saban benched him for Tua Tagovailoa, Hurts was the new symbol of refusing to no for an answer, conducting an opera of how to play the position and authoring a blueprint on how to scare Mahomes.
That was, by keeping him on the sideline and forcing him to watch with 115 million others as Hurts controlled the ball and directed drives as he pleased with exquisite throws and designed runs. Shockingly, the Chiefs managed just nine plays in a real-time span of one hour and 35 minutes. Only when Hurts inexplicably dropped the ball in the second quarter, with linebacker Nick Bolton returning the fumble for a momentum-changing Chiefs touchdown, did he seem the least bit breakable. The Eagles were primed for the kill. Would Nick Sirianni, who openly wept during the national anthem, cry tears of joy and win a Vince Lombardi Trophy in only his second season as head coach?
Here’s where the magic of Mahomes, and the experience of Reid, took over. During a 29-minute intermission, as Rihanna prowled on platforms above the field, Mahomes’ ankle was re-wrapped and medicated, as it was during the previous two playoff games. And in the the third quarter, the MVP allayed fears by leading a 75-yard TD drive, including a 14-yard scramble to the Eagles’ 4-yard line. What we had here, in the Arizona desert, was another classic game in an NFL postseason that couldn’t be orchestrated better by commissioner Roger Goodell, who said later, “What a football game. It doesn’t get any better than that.” Knowing the night would roar to a crescendo in the final minutes, a nation of crazed prop bettors — a record 50.4 million U.S. adults were expected to wager $16 billion — braced for a Mahomes climax. Among them was the rapper Drake, who bet $700,000 on the Chiefs. “Pls do not analyze the logic behind these bets. There is none,” he wrote on Instagram.
He won, as the rest of us hyperventilated. In the final five minutes, Mahomes directed his latest game-winning drive, extending it with a killer scramble past flailing defenders while completing 13 of his final 14 pass attempts. Consider this, please: A man with a sprained ankle rambled for 26 yards at the end of a Super Bowl. That was the play that won a championship, much as Philly people are blaming the refs as they swallow failure in a Super Bowl — after losing the World Series three months ago. Hurts was bummed, knowing he might not have a similar chance as the rebuilt Eagles look at more offseason roster changes.
“I don’t do this to be loved. I don’t do this to be hated. I do it for the guys in the locker room. I do it for all the time we’ve invested,” he said eloquently in defeat. “It’s a tough feeling to come up short. But I know the only direction is to rise. That will be the mentality going forward.”
For now, he’s the latest victim of the quarterbacking king, in a triumph that elevates Mahomes as America’s preeminent athlete while Brady retires and a recently minted LeBron James struggles to reach .500 in his 20th NBA season. With a good chance of winning again next season, the Chiefs will be considered a dynasty in some quarters with three titles in five years. “I’m not going to say dynasty — yet,” Mahomes said. “We’re not done.”
Experiencing two difficult lumps between his two championships — a Super Bowl loss to Brady and a home playoff loss to Cincinnati last season — drove Mahomes to quiet critics who said he’d lost a step. Actually, he did lose a step, via injury, and hobbled his way to redemption. How does it feel to have two? “I think it’s the time in my career when I got it, and the failure of the last two years. That gives you a great appreciation,” he said. “I thought the first Super Bowl was kind of like 'Oh, this is amazing. We won the Super Bowl!’ You're just like a little kid winning a prize at the fair. Whereas this one, you've dealt with failure. You understand how hard it is to get back on this stage and win this game. I've played a Super Bowl where I got blown out. I got all hyped up, then you go out there and you don't do anything. Then I lose the AFC Championship Game in overtime when I thought we had a chance to win the Super Bowl that year. To have a full, brand-new team and have to go through the strain of being better and better every single day, it gives you a greater appreciation of winning this game."
So it’s off to Disneyland, three years after visiting Disney World, for a fairy-tale character who seems too good to be true. He’ll have his wife, daughter and son with him at the park. It’s time to be a dad. “I told Brittany, I’ve got to help them out with the bathroom routine and the bedtime routine,” he said. “That had to wait until the offseason.” He’ll also continue to save the world, a chore he performs better than most, with an NFL Man of the Year trophy in his future, as well. As Mahomes has said often, “I’m at a point in my career where I can use my voice and really, really make an impact in this world.”
If he must, he will limp through any and all duties. Meanwhile, we’ll have to ask Elon Musk if this football mastery through pain is the work of A.I. Seems he was sitting in a stadium suite with Rupert Murdoch, about the only forgettable memory of an otherwise transcendent night.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.