The most notable US athletes of 2020: No 3 – Patrick Mahomes, the ultimate weapon
To describe Patrick Mahomes as the best player at the most important position in America’s most popular sport, which he is, somehow feels like an undersell. From the moment he took over as the first-choice quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs three years ago, Mahomes has turned the National Football League on its ear and laid waste to tired misconceptions about black passers with one record-breaking, dogmadefying performance after another. The whole piece continues to unfold with the dizzying illogic of a dream we’ve yet to wake up from.
Occasionally, the Chiefs will finish a game with fewer points than their opponent. It’s become increasingly rare as their quarterback’s career has progressed – they’ve lost exactly once in 21 games over the past 416 days – but it does and can still happen. Yet Mahomes has never had a bad game as a professional. I mean take a look. He’s won 42 of his 51 career starts and put up 40, 51, 28, 31, 31, 13, 24, 32 and 32 points in the defeats. It’s hard to overstate how not normal this is. But the totality of Mahomes’ body of work has forced us to recalibrate our expectations of what’s possible on a football field.
The closest thing to a bad day at the office we’ve seen from the Kansas City superstar came, fascinatingly, in the biggest game of his life. For more than three quarters in this year’s Super Bowl, he was harried, hassled and hounded by the San Francisco 49ers’ historically stingy defense. With the Chiefs trailing 20-10 and less than 12 minutes remaining, he threw behind his receiver on a crossing route for his second interception of the night. At that point, Mahomes had completed 18 of 29 passes for 172 yards and no touchdowns.
But Kansas City’s defense forced the Niners to punt and Mahomes did as Mahomes does. He marshaled three straight touchdown drives in just over five minutes, swinging a double-digit deficit into a double-digit win and nailing down Kansas City’s first NFL championship since the Nixon administration. The only surprise was that we were surprised at all.
But even that doesn’t fully communicate the transformative effect Mahomes has wrought, the extent to which he’s changed a notoriously stolid league for the better. It’s not just that he wins but the way he goes about it. Yes, the NFL has seen its share devil-may-care gunslingers in its 101year history, from Sammy Baugh to Sonny Jurgensen to Dan Fouts to Brett Favre, but Mahomes’s ability to freelance and casual disregard for traditional mechanics, with no compromise in accuracy, is in a category of its own. He delivers the ball overhead, sidearmed, (nearly) underhanded and even left- handed with the improvisational flair more typical of the sandlot than the NFL’s billion-dollar stadiums. Overcommit to the pass and he will beat you with his feet. There’s never been another quite like him.
Next month Mahomes and the Chiefs will enter the playoffs as hot favorites to win back-to-back Super Bowl titles for the first time since the New England Patriots in the early aughts (and the first to accomplish it legally since the Denver Broncos back in the 90s). But with the standard he’s established in three short years, the outcome almost feels secondary. Mahomes has come to embody a certain boundlessness of possibility: there’s no limit to what may come with the next year, the next week, the next snap. When the dream’s this good, reality can wait.