I’m the worst person to watch a Chiefs game with. Decades of Kansas City sports have jaded me to plan for the worst, hope for the best. At this point I’ll admit it’s just as much my brand as it is a coping mechanism to protect myself from heartbreaking losses.
You’d think I’d be over that by now.
Patrick Lavon Mahomes II is good at football. He’s good at running with the football. He’s good at throwing the football. He’s good at leading other men to be good at the football.
He’s the perfect quarterback and each week, each season, in his still very young career, pundits and blue check goblins are trying their very best to replace him as the top Guy in the NFL. It’s silly. It’s just silly.
It happened again this week. Josh Allen, who faced the NFL’s 30th rated schedule, was the Guy they were ready to replace Mahomes with. He’s big, has a big arm, and they so badly need to push a narrative to protect against a boring decade (in their minds) of one player ruling the league.
Allen played well Sunday night. Very well. He made throws, converted third downs, converted fourth downs, and dissected a clueless secondary in what many were saying was his crowing moment.
But momma, they forgot about Pat.
Thirteen seconds remained in the game and the real Guy didn’t flinch. Mahomes threw two darts on incredibly well-designed plays, to drag the Chiefs into field goal range. He showed the type of raw physical skills and quarterback genius with his Professor X mind-meld with Travis Kelce, that we’ve never seen before.
Harrison Butker drilled the game-tying 49-yarder after missing a field goal and an extra-point earlier in the game. The game was tied. Headed to overtime. The deflation of Allen’s crowning moment happened just as quickly as it rose.
Mahomes is a savant. Just when you worry the game of football has evolved to be so pass happy quarterbacks will begin to catch up with Mahomes’ production, he does something so outwardly unheard of to snap you back into focus. For everything the post-Vermeil era Chiefs were to futility, he is to umatched greatness.
13 seconds.
The players in the league know. You have to assume they get a kick out of watching pregame shows and the experts pick against him.
The experts keep wanting to take the torch from Mahomes, and he keeps reminded them why he’s the Guy.
In overtime Mahomes was a surgeon—as if you’d expect anything different—going 6 for 6 and hitting Kelce with a back-shoulder-perfection strike to seal the victory.
Mahomes is an indescribable force. There is no deficit too steep you feel is unreachable, there is no matchup too challenging you feel is unwinable, and now, somehow, even a mere 13 seconds isn’t enough to count out Mahomes.
The man has changed our lives as Chiefs fans. The days of plan for the worst, hope for the best are long in the past. This is a new era, a Mahomes era, where you plan for the best and hope to see something you’ve never seen before.
And that Guy often delivers.
Yes it was, Patrick. Yes it was.