Mahomes made for the spotlight
We’ll have a Super Bowl matchup after this weekend, and it’s hard to believe it won’t be one that features the Kansas City Chiefs finally returning to the big game.
They’ll hardly recognize the event, having not been there since beating the Minnesota Vikings for their sole championship in 1970. Since then, the Super Bowl has grown into a monstrosity, with the game itself almost a sidebar to a massive celebration of the football industry and all of its attractive and less attractive characteristics. Well, football and the military. This is a sport that has wedded itself to America’s national fascination with the military like no other, and we’ll see that again Feb. 2.
The Chiefs, then representatives of the American Football League, won it 50 years ago with Lenny Dawson, Otis Taylor, Buck Buchanan and Jan Stenerud, and they’ve been trying to make it back ever since. They’ve had lots of great players and some good teams, too. But nobody and nothing quite like Patrick Lavon Mahomes II.
Mahomes is the single most important reason why you should expect the Chiefs to be one of the participants in Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, and the single most important reason why you should expect K.C. to win that game, too.
Why? Well, because of the overwhelming feeling that if something or somebody was going to stop Mahomes this season, it would have happened by now.
It would have happened back in October when Mahomes dislocated his right kneecap in a game against Denver. A dislocated kneecap! Sounds like an injury that ends a football season. The reigning NFL most valuable player, however, was back in three weeks.
If that wasn’t going to stop Mahomes, surely last week’s nightmarish scenario at Arrowhead Stadium would have. This was the juncture, after all, at which many promising Chiefs seasons have ended. At home. As a favourite.
It seemed like the national anthem had barely finished and the Houston Texans were up 24-0. A long pass, a blocked punt, a dropped punt. It appeared that instead of slowly torturing Chiefs fans, this NFL season was going to punch them right in the unmentionables.
Mahomes surely had all kinds of reasons to panic at that moment. He had one playoff win under his belt to that point in his young career. His best receivers were dropping the ball. He’d already seen the quarterback likely to win the MVP award this year, Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, go down in flames the night before in very similar circumstances.
On the Kansas City bench, peering imperturbably over his glasses, was head coach Andy Reid. Reid never gets flustered. He sticks to the game plan, patiently tries to put out fires. But at the same time, his presence might not necessarily have comforted Mahomes, since Reid has an entire catalogue of disappointing playoff failures of his own. Indeed, no NFL team coached by Reid had ever fought back to win from a 21-point deficit, let alone a 24-point hole.
This was the moment for a 24-year-old quarterback to wilt, or fight back but ultimately fall short. Instead, Mahomes exploded. He blew the entire game up. In a symbolic “hold my beer” performance, he erased that Houston lead in almost no time at all, throwing four touchdown passes in the second quarter alone.
He and tight end Travis Kelce seemed connected by some sort of Vulcan mind meld. Mahomes looked like he knew the Texans’ defensive calls the way Astros hitters somehow knew what pitches were coming. He drifted and danced in the Kansas City backfield, throwing a few passes sidearm just for fun. When it was all over, Kansas City had scored 51 points and become the first NFL team to win by more than 20 after trailing by more than 20.
Yes, if Mahomes was going to be stopped, it was last weekend. And he wasn’t.
Now, don’t take this to mean there’s no way the Tennessee Titans can shove another bitter pill down the throats of Chiefs fans. The Titans were the Houston Oilers for the first 46 years of their existence, and at one point loaded all their hopes on the broad shoulders of a running back named Earl
Campbell and tried to ram their way to the Super Bowl.
They kept running into a
Steel Curtain, however, and never made it. On Sunday, the former Oilers who now play out of Nashville will do the same with hulking running back Derrick Henry, who has so far almost single-handedly bulldozed the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens in these NFL playoffs.
The hard-nosed Titans are certainly capable of stopping Mahomes. But they shouldn’t. The same goes for the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers, who will decide the identity of the NFC representative in the Super Bowl. The 49ers are really good and so are the Packers. As should be the case, there are no soft touches left, no teams that are truly long shots to win — although the Titans come close.
But there’s just something about Mahomes, something slightly revolutionary, something a little cheeky about his creativity and daring on the football field.
He was the 10th pick of the 2017 draft, and there’s something fabulous about that — about all the stats and testing that goes into the draft, and all the unending, breathless analysis that surrounds it — and yet nobody seemed to notice that nine teams passed on the best player before he was taken. Including the 49ers. Including the Titans.
It’s not quite Tom Brady going in the sixth round or Joe Montana in the third, but still pretty cool.
Mahomes could’ve had his season ended last weekend. Probably should have. It’s going to take something truly special to stop him now.