WE’RE WATCHING A MASTER IN MAHOMES, WHO HAS TIME TO FIX HIS DAD BOD
If he can win three Super Bowls in five years, while allowing an enraged Kelce to keep smooching Taylor, what if he tones his physique — playfully — and becomes a bigger career threat to Brady?
The “dad bod” needed mere seconds to win another Super Bowl. He laughs at his physique, but truth be known after his third championship in five years, it’s the only flesh he can’t control on a football field he otherwise influences like few in history. Let Patrick Mahomes wonder, at 28, if he can match Tom Brady with four more titles and more MVPs. Let him shape up bones that look sublime to us.
“I might take my shirt off right there in the middle of the field,” he said.
Let him.
Because much like a sportsman who took care of his six-pack, Michael Jordan, the reigning hero of the Kansas City Chiefs makes sure everyone around him wins. What did Mahomes have in his accompaniment Sunday night? Travis Kelce didn’t do much to impress his girlfriend, a lounge singer who flew in from Tokyo, by bullying his 65-year-old head coach, Andy Reid, with an indignant sideline shove. Name me his weapons. How was he staying in a game against the San Francisco 49ers, who had a multitude of options including a banging Christian McCaffrey, headed toward honors?
But we kept waiting for Brock Purdy to make a third-down throw that made him more than an American fairy tale. He didn’t, having a ball knocked down near the end of regulation, which provided a field goal that the Chiefs matched, sending a four-hour-plus epic into overtime. Then Purdy, after coach Kyle Shanahan oddly accepted the ball after winning the coin flip, missed at the 9-yard line when dealing with another pressure blitz. A field goal gave Mahomes the last snap, the one he doesn’t miss.
He took it 75 yards for a touchdown that should quiet down every fool who thinks he’s not on the level of Brady and beyond every other quarterback who has lived. With six seconds left, the Chiefs let him fake a handoff, roll right and find Mecole Hardman Jr. — a New York Jets castoff, of all folks — open for the score that left Mahomes rolling around the Las Vegas sod and Taylor Swift in another long kissy-huggy embrace with Kelce. The play was called by Reid, who wanted to finish the celebration without a second overtime and could have pondered his tight end but found Hardman, an unlikely but fitting co-star in a 25-22 thriller.
“Our mindset was: Go win the game right here,” Mahomes said. “Once we got that ball — we fell short in regulation, but we’re not going to do that again. We’re going to go out there and win the game.”
“The last drive,” said Reid, “was a thing of beauty.”
And what did Mahomes tell his teammates before the drive? “Let’s go win this thing,” Kelce said. “I guess at this point, I take it for granted, but I know we’re in every single game I’ve ever played with him, no matter what the score is or how much time is left. That guy’s got magic in his right arm, man, and he can just propel us as you saw today.”
The game was physical and, at times, sleepy. But this is how Mahomes wins and thrives, returning from another 10-point deficit, and we finally could forget the aging actors, religious parties and political dopes advertised by CBS while Tony Romo was suggesting the Chiefs give up a late touchdown ... why? Look, Mahomes can have the 76-year-old body of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He saved the Chiefs and a cranky Kelce and a coach whose team often appeared it didn’t belong. Now Reid has won three titles, joining only four other coaches, including Bill Belichick.
What Mahomes hoped he could say out loud was one word: “Dynasty.” In the NFL, the Chiefs have won back-to-back crowns for the first time since the 2003-04 New England Patriots. Now they’re talking three-peat, which can’t be marketed because Pat Riley bought the phrase. It will be used anyway, starting in the streets of their Midwestern town of rich barbecue, home of a global monster.
“It means a ton. This is awesome. Legendary,” Mahomes said. “I am going to celebrate tonight, celebrate at the parade and then work my way to get back in this game next year. I am going to do whatever I can to be back in this game next year. Three-peat. It’s culture, man. Coach Reid has been the ultimate leader and keeps pushing me to be better. I think that’s important. He’s not trying to make me anyone else. I don’t think I’m the quarterback I am if I didn’t have Coach Reid. He wants you to be the best person you can be.”
Part of his work will be fixing his “dad bod,” seen in a docuseries that caught him with some flab. I noticed. Did you? “I got a bad angle, man. I need the upward angle so they come down to the chest a little bit,” he said. “I have a six-pack and it’s just under the dad bod. If you feel, there might be some skin there, but underneath that the six-pack is there. You just have to get real close, and you have to squint a little bit and I think you’ll see it.”
He laughs at himself. It’s an honor that our country has Mahomes as the face of our biggest league. His father was arrested on a drunk-driving charge two weekends ago, for the third time in an 11-episode legal entanglement, after his younger brother had three felony charges dismissed when he allegedly grabbed a woman by the neck and forcefully kissed her three times without her consent. He never let the coverage bother him. Instead, he was helping Kelce finish his season with Swift at his side, whispering something that could have been a proposal … but who can tell?
“Well, you know the goal has always been to get three,” Kelce screamed at the audience. “But we couldn’t get here without getting that two, and having that target on our back all year? How about that. We get a chance to do it three times in a row.” That came after he sang “Viva Las Vegas” and shouted the usual, “You’ve gotta fight for your right to party!”
Did he make up with Reid, who had shoved him earlier in the postseason? “You guys saw that. I’m going to keep it between us unless my ‘mic’d up’ tells the world,” he said. “I was just telling him how much I loved him.”
Maybe later. “He came over and gave me a hug and said ‘sorry about that,’ ’’ Reid said. “He just wants to be on the field, and he wants to play. There’s nobody I get better than I get him. He’s a competitive kid, and he loves to play. He makes me feel young.”
So did Hardman. “I blacked out when I caught the ball,” he said.
As the Chiefs keep adding weapons, the losing side asks if Shanahan ever will win a Super Bowl. He is 44. He might look 84 next season. Four years earlier, his 49ers were outscored 21-0 by Mahomes in the final six-plus minutes of a 31-20 loss. Three years earlier, he lost to the Patriots as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator after leading 28-3. Now this, fueled by effusive talk he should have kicked to the Chiefs instead of accepting the ball. “They’re crazy,” Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones said of the 49ers. “Overtime rules have changed.” They have, but Shanahan wanted the ball three times in the 15-minute period. Did he not consider Mahomes in the equation?
“None of us have a ton of experience with it. We went through all the analytics and talked to those guys,” Shanahan said. “We just thought it would be better. We wanted the ball third. If both teams matched and scored, we wanted to be the ones who had the chance to go win. So we got that field goal, so knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal. If we did, we thought it was in our hands after that.”
Purdy played well, at times. In the big moments, he was lost. “We have the team and the offense to score touchdowns, and I failed to put our team in position to do that,” he said. “It just hurts. Everyone wanted it so bad. We had the team to do it and win the whole thing.” Again, Shanahan is a master of offensive gadgetry but has lost his last two Super Bowls with Purdy and long-gone Jimmy Garoppolo. Meanwhile, Mahomes hit all eight OT passes for 42 yards and ran for 19 yards on 3rd-and-1 to the 49ers’ 13. “The Kansas City Chiefs are never underdogs,” he said. “Just know that.”
Not when he’s the emperor. “When you go against guys like Tom Brady and Pat Mahomes, you never feel comfortable with a lead. Those guys are two of the best to ever play the game,” Shanahan said.
Said Reid: “There’s no facade there. He comes to work every day humble.”
The night’s ending was worthy of the starpower, with Jay-Z and LeBron James in the crowd as Usher dragged through the halftime show. Did we really see a Robert Kennedy Jr. commercial at $7 million for 30 seconds? Along with ads for Jesus, Scientology and artificial intelligence? Even President Biden weighed in, writing on X of the conspiracy theorists: “Just like we drew it up.” We deserved a conclusion worth our time, as did Patrick Mahomes, who was asked how can play as long as Brady did at 45.
“Doing work outside of the building. It takes taking care of your body,” he said. “Trying to get rid of the dad bod that I got. But try to do whatever you can just to be healthy and go out and be the best player that you can be.”
If he ever improves his goods, what exactly are we watching here? For the next decade and beyond, the greatest football player ever?
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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.