How Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes responded to most painful loss of his career
Back in Tyler, Texas, and this has been seven or eight years ago now, Patrick Mahomes would always show up after the losses. He’d arrive for workouts after the wins, too, but his personal trainer noticed something different after the losses.
He wanted to talk about them.
Sort of. Mahomes had zero interest in dwelling on them in the conventional manner — he wasn’t much for digesting the bummer of it all — but he valued rehashing moments, plays or sequences.
Essentially, he wanted to analyze all he’d done wrong.
“That’s always been a motivating factor for him,” said Bobby Stroupe, Mahomes’ longtime trainer. “(He) sets his eyes and sets his sight on what are the things that he can do to be better as a player and be better for his team.”
An NFL Most Valuable Player award and Super Bowl trophy behind him, this is how Patrick Mahomes started an offseason that followed the worst loss of his career.
A look at himself.
A look at all he’d done wrong.
The Buccaneers stunned his Chiefs 31-9 in Super Bowl LV, and even if the game had statistically been Mahomes’ worst — he’d never before failed to get his team into the end zone at least once — few blamed him for how it unraveled. His scrambles covered the equivalent of five football fields when he tried to elude relentless pressure. How could he have been expected to be at his best in those circumstances?
“I don’t think we did all we could to help Patrick out in that game,” general manager Brett Veach said.
Mahomes re-watched the Super Bowl shortly after it ended. As Veach and the Chiefs front office built him a new protection plan as promised, Mahomes’ attention rested with other details.
“I wanted to know,” he would say, “what I could have done better.”
The adjustments
The takeaways derived from the total package — conclusions based on all 18 games rather than just one — but damn if the Super Bowl blowout didn’t have a way of illuminating the blind spots.
The Chiefs had won seven straight games by one possession in the regular season — an NFL record and a streak that provided a feeling of invincibility. Someway, somehow, things always seemed to work themselves out.
Truthfully, they had for two years. A year earlier, Mahomes returned from a knee injury so gruesome he feared his season was done; he later shrugged off three straight double-digit playoff deficits; he later still turned aside three miserable quarters and won a Super Bowl MVP award.
It always turned out OK in the end.
Maybe he got too comfortable with that. Too comfortable playing from behind. Maybe he overlooked the importance of a fast start. Maybe, in fact, there was a deficit too deep to overcome.
“We kind of relied on we were just going to figure it out,” he said.
That’s one.
Second, while the offensive line had failed to hold up its end of the bargain, Mahomes became too eager to depart the pocket even on the occasions when it actually did stand strong. At times, he responded to a pass rush that had yet to arrive.
“That’s something I’ve been working on,” he said.
That’s two.
But the study didn’t stop with the Super Bowl. Mahomes won 16 of the other 17 games he started, but each of them had something to offer. Something from which to glean.
Some would require adjustments in the way he approached the game. The way he tried to march down field — not every play needs to be a home run.
He’s applied his observations in training camp and the preseason — he’s made a point, for example, to do as little scrambling as possible, sticking instead with the play as it’s called. That’s easier said than done. More than a handful of his best moments have come from extending plays. He’ll still do that. But he wants it to be a Plan B.
Other modifications would require a preparation for his body.
“You can’t just go get revenge — you have to stop the bleeding first,” Stroupe said. “And for him, we had something to address this offseason.”
The work
Mahomes played the AFC Championship Game and Super Bowl on a turf toe injury that would necessitate surgery only days after the latter.
He’d shrugged off its severity in the game, and he wouldn’t let it slow his offseason, either. With his foot enclosed by a walking boot, Mahomes called Stroupe, ready to work.
Mahomes said he stopped thinking about the Super Bowl loss about two weeks after he endured it. In a honest moment, though, he admits it might always bother him. It’s been the backdrop of his offseason.
Even if the Chiefs had repeated as Super Bowl champions, Stroupe says Mahomes would find motivation. Just the way he’s built. But the loss, if nothing else, made that easy.
“There’s no doubt he was motivated,” Stroupe said. “I’ve seen it. There was a little less joking around. He’s never been silly or anything like that, but I would say the word that kind of sums it up for me this offseason is intent. He was intent with everything that he did and laser focused.”
In conjunction with Chiefs vice president of sports performance Rick Burkholder and assistant athletic trainer Julie Frymyer, Mahomes beat every timeline in his injury recovery, a full participant in summer minicamps. It received the bulk of his attention in those initial weeks following the season.
But then he really got to work. With Stroupe, Mahomes concentrated on preparing his body for a longer season, to be sure, but also the movements his body might endure within one. He wanted to get the ball out of his hands more quickly, and that would demand targeted exercises.
“As you see quarterbacks mature, you still take your shots and you still hold onto the ball, but at the end of the day, we have so many playmakers on this team,” Mahomes said. “If you can get the ball out to guys like Clyde (Edwards-Helaire) and Tyreek (Hill), Mecole (Hardman) and (Travis) Kelce in the flats, they can make a lot of big plays happen.”
Stroupe instructed Mahomes to take a couple extra vacations this offseason to clear his mind. Stop thinking about football for a bit, he told him. Mahomes obliged to a certain extent — he did take some trips — but he didn’t skip the workouts. At least once, he requested Stroupe travel with him. He didn’t want to miss a day of working out.
Physically, the toe held up in minicamp. Mentally, he turned a corner, too.
By summer, he says, he’d put it all behind him. The injury. The loss. And he’d turned toward 2021. The proof came at a celebrity golf tournament, when, during an interview, he mentioned a unique goal: 20-0, he said.
The remark stuck its intended landing, his teammates jumping on board. It became the talk of the summer in Chiefs terms, no longer the manner in which the previous year had ended.
A new year, indeed.
But before Mahomes officially moved on from that game, he had to take another look back.
He re-watched the Super Bowl a second and final time, the agony of it providing the same purpose as the first.
“That,” he said, “is how I can get better.”