One year later: How Patrick Mahomes turned a serious injury into a blip on the radar
Patrick Mahomes sat on a training table inside a locker room in Denver moments after his kneecap popped so far out of place it found temporary residency in his lower thigh.
Teammates would later admit they feared the reigning NFL most valuable player would be done for the season after only seven weeks, and in turn, their Super Bowl hopes would be all but done, too.
But inside this visiting locker room, all remained calm. The initial x-rays had offered Mahomes and the Chiefs a sliver of optimism that night, though only MRI images the following day could provide actual conclusions. They’d have to wait.
Mahomes sat and watched the remainder of the football game — a 30-6 Chiefs win over the Broncos — on a locker-room TV, general manager Brett Veach at his side. At some point, not long after the injury prompted his arrival to the room, Veach turned to Mahomes with a prophecy.
“It’s going to be an amazing story to talk about,” Veach said, “after we win the Super Bowl.”
You know the rest of the story. Mahomes missed only two starts with a dislocated kneecap. He led the Chiefs to their first championship in half a century. He was named the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player, the youngest in NFL history to earn both that distinction and a regular-season MVP honor.
In the offseason, he signed a $503 million contract, the richest in league history. The richest in North American sports history, too. He got engaged to his high school sweetheart. A few weeks later, they announced they’re expecting their first child.
He is, to state the obvious, on some kind of run over the past year.
And to think: Just 365 days ago Saturday, for at least a moment, it looked ready to come crashing down with one quarterback sneak.
The comeback
Mahomes begged to go back in the game that night in Denver. He didn’t know he had been officially removed until he was instructed to take off his pads.
His fiancee and father were invited into the locker room. “It’s OK,” he told them. “I’m fine.” He called his mother back home in Tyler, Texas, and relayed the same.
His longtime trainer received a two-word text: I’m good.
And yet he couldn’t be sure. Even when he called his trainer that evening to follow up, it was still a day before the MRI results would show he escaped catastrophic damage in his knee. But their conversation had a very pointed message.
“We didn’t talk about how it happened or why it happened — he was just focused completely on doing whatever he had to do to get back on the field,” said Bobby Stroupe, Mahomes’ longtime trainer. “It was all positive, but that’s Patrick..”
Within 48 hours after the kneecap dislocation, Mahomes sent Stroupe video messages of himself running on an underwater treadmill. He sent a calendar of daily workouts, all with one target in mind.
A quick return.
A really quick return.
Mahomes insisted on not skipping a practice, and so in the portion of those sessions that were open to the media, there he was, stretching alongside his teammates. Truth be told, he didn’t want to sit out a single game. Felt like he could play the following Sunday.
Wanted to play.
But the requirements for a return from injury necessitate approval from not just the player, but also his team’s medical personnel and coaches.
Mahomes nodded. The others?
“We were the bad guys — pushing him down,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said.
By definition of a patellar dislocation, the injury included damage to Mahomes’ medial patellofemoral ligament (MPFL). That’s the only way the kneecap can escape its groove, according to medical professionals who spoke to The Star.
The surrounding ligaments and cartilage remained intact. If there was any luck involved in this process, it rested there. It could’ve been worse. Some are damaging enough to require immediate surgery.
Within hours of receiving the MRI results, the Chiefs’ medical staff informed Mahomes the rapidness of his return would depend on a few variables. Over one of those, he had critical control.
The rehab.
The work.
“The immediacy of getting those surrounding muscles to start firing and not shut down is key with that injury,” said Kirk McCullough, a Sporting Kansas City team physician and a member of an NFL Musculoskeletal Committee. “They naturally will want to shut down because of swelling, and the muscles in those extremities will recognize the trauma that has occurred, and they’ll want to shut down.
“So the credit goes to Patrick and his trainers and physical therapists who immediately started addressing those things early on and limited the shut down of those muscles that would have otherwise extended his timeline.”
The Chiefs designed his daily workouts, led by head athletic trainer Rick Burkholder and assistant athletic trainer Julie Frymyer, who worked with Mahomes closely. They aimed to strengthen the adjacent muscles and prevent atrophy with exercises targeting the inside part of the quadriceps muscle. These weren’t one-hour trips to the gym. They were laborious, some lasting four, five hours per day.
Over and over again. Day after day. Week after week.
But in Mahomes, the Chiefs had a willing patient.
That’s how he returned so quickly.
“I just knew I was going to attack it and do whatever I could to be back out on the field as quickly as possible,” Mahomes said. “In football, you only get 16 games guaranteed. ... I was just trying to get on the field as quickly as possible and not let any moment get lost.”
‘I’m back to normal’
In the opening quarter of Super Bowl LIV, Mahomes escaped the pocket and saw daylight on a third-and-11 play. But it closed quickly, and as Mahomes neared the sticks, he realized he would need to either slide early to avoid contact or slide late and gain the first down.
He chose the latter.
San Francisco safety Jimmie Ward punished him for it, delivering a brutal hit that knocked the ball loose. Mahomes popped up immediately.
“That’s a good ass-hit!” he said.
Almost instantly after the most serious injury of his life — it had previously been rolling his ankle in high school — Mahomes played with no recollection of it ever happening. The knee brace is already gone. The fearlessness has returned. Remember that run against the Tennessee Titans, on which he bowled over defenders as he found the end zone just before halftime?
“I’m just back to normal,” he said.
He worked during the offseason with Stroupe on ways to strengthen the surrounding muscles. The Chiefs’ trainers still incorporate preventive exercises into his daily routine.
Mahomes decided against offseason surgery, as some past NFL players have elected to undergo. Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford returned in the same season he dislocated a kneecap, but then addressed it with an operation the ensuing offseason to lessen the risk of recurrence.
Mahomes has stuck to the rehab. To the work.
“I think with anyone, you cannot deny that once this occurs, the risk of it happening again on that knee, the threshold is lowered compared to the opposite one,” McCullough said. “But if you have gone this far and been dedicated and diligent to continuing to keep those muscles strong, and I’m sure he has been, you can lower that risk.
“There are exercises that are preventative that folks try to do to provide dynamic stability. The ligaments are what they are. But the muscles provide the stability. Those muscles will fire in coordinated fashion to prevent that early motion if it’s starting to go into an injurious zone.”
None of this is Mahomes’ favorite topic to talk about, because, well, what’s it matter? He’s past it now. That’s his nature. That’s what so many point toward first when analyzing how he turned a traumatic injury into nothing more than a brief obstacle.
The shift of his kneecap was so jarring to see that night that teammate Travis Kelce said, “it didn’t look like a knee.” Some of his teammates said they had trouble concentrating over the final three quarters.
One year later, it seems almost ... forgotten?
“I don’t think about it at all, honestly,” Mahomes said.
Which is why he deemed Veach’s words that night — a reminder of the Super Bowl goal — felt so fitting. They were focused on the future, on what could still lie ahead.
There’s perhaps no remark better suited for Patrick Mahomes. Or perhaps no player better suited for the remark.
“That’s just one of those stories that will live forever,” Mahomes said. “At that moment, for him to say that to me, it’s something I’ll remember forever.”