In candid interview, Tyrann Mathieu says he’s ‘heartbroken’ to not be back with Chiefs

Tyrann Mathieu is sitting on the porch of a cafe in downtown New Orleans, still trying to make sense of it all.

Tucked one mile away behind him stands Eleanor McMain, the secondary school he attended after Hurricane Katrina displaced his family. This is home, the eclectic culture responsible for the boy who grew up without his parents, the teenager whose bad habit nearly cost him what he loved and the man who feels a little misunderstood.

A few weeks ago, Mathieu learned his time with the Chiefs was over, an education provided when they signed his replacement, Justin Reid, to a three-year contract. He would’ve missed the obvious signs, he says between sips of coffee, had he not anticipated this ending.

The NFL is a business after all, a platitude that makes exceptions for no one. But sitting at the local Bearcat Cafe, digging into his dish of shrimp and grits with a sprinkle of Louisiana hot sauce, is the other side of the business.

The human side of it.

“Bro, I was depressed,” Mathieu says. “Heartbroken. Heart. Broken.

“I could not understand it. I could not, man.”

The separation came at the Chiefs’ request. Mathieu did not want to leave Kansas City after three seasons, the first of which included the Super Bowl trophy he was signed to help the Chiefs hoist when they made him the league’s highest-paid safety.

The Chiefs elected to move on this time, though, not offering 29-year-old Mathieu a new contract and instead giving Reid a three-year, $31.5 million deal that includes $20 million guaranteed.

“To be honest,” Mathieu says, “if they would’ve offered me Justin Reid’s deal, obviously I would’ve tried to negotiate, but if that’s where they drew their line in the sand, I probably would’ve took it. I probably would’ve took it.

“Agents are going to do their thing, but at the end of the day, it’s the player’s decision whether to sign it or not.”

Once more, as he shakes his head and twirls his fork through his food: “Probably would’ve took it.”

His kids — particularly 7-year-old Tyrann Jr., who Mathieu says is even more devoted to football than he was at that age — have taken this hard. Tyrann Jr. doesn’t want to leave Kansas City. He’s built lasting friendships there that will now become just another blip in his childhood.

Mathieu’s fiancee, Sydni Russell, in the ever-supportive way that drew Mathieu to her, reminds him this is a chance to “spread your greatness around.”

“I don’t think she gets how hard I took it,” Mathieu says. “I don’t like moving. I hate this.”

He believes he’s reached a good head space now, though it sounds as if he’s still trying to convince himself of that during an hour-long interview with The Star over brunch. Mathieu is keenly aware of his emotions, always has been, and he’s realized that sometimes this can be for the best, and sometimes it can be, well, what brings trouble.

Every so often, he wonders if this kind of thing would be easier to swallow if maybe he just didn’t care so much.

“Happiness,” he says, “is, like, under construction.

“I’ve always been working towards that.”

He turned that corner a couple of weeks ago — from heartbroken to happiness — after realizing that sitting back and waiting a little longer during NFL free agency can provide him with family time he hasn’t enjoyed in years. Time to step away. He’s devoted much of his life to football, from the moment the alarm buzzes before 6 a.m. to the moment his head hits the pillow, and only recently did he realize that this has had an effect.

What’s more evident is he feels something else bubbling. He always feels something else bubbling. Something without an off switch. Something that has made him such a productive player on the field, but can put him into tight corners.

Passion.

He does care. About what you think of him. About what people say about him. About why he’s been left stranded yet again — something that is all too familiar to him.

“What I can’t figure out,” he says, “is how the hell I’m gonna be on my fourth (NFL) team.”

The ending in KC

Nine weeks ago, the Bengals stunned the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game, and afterward, Mathieu sat on the home bench at Arrowhead Stadium and stared at the celebration.

After awhile, he turned to teammate Charvarius Ward, another impending free agent who would sign with San Francisco this offseason.

“Man,” Mathieu said to Ward, “did we just play our last game at Arrowhead?”

“Yeah, big brother,” Ward replied. “I think so, big brother. We gonna see, though.”

Mathieu knew it was over. In a postgame Zoom conference with media that evening, he would talk with a crack in his voice and refer to the Chiefs in the third person, no longer “we” now, but “they.”

He played the entire season knowing this is how it would end, but not knowing why. His representatives had only limited conversations with the Chiefs last summer, and that’s when it hit him — maybe they just don’t want him back.

“It was the hardest year of my career,” Mathieu says. “I’ve been through ACLs (surgeries). I’ve been through a lot of stuff in this league — having to move my family every two or three years. But that was one of the hardest, longest years of my life.”

Because?

“I just knew. Everything I was working for, man. Every day I wake up trying to make the Chiefs better, trying to make the community better. I’m just working toward that knowing that there’s an end date. There’s an expiration date to that.”

It affected his play on the field, he says. He played with different emotion. At times, he played without emotion. He stopped talking trash, as he put it. Stopped celebrating the big moments.

He was just playing. And here’s the thing about Mathieu just playing: When he does that, he no longer stands out. He blends in.

“If you look too hard, you won’t really see my greatness,” he says, gesturing to himself, “‘cause, yo, this dude is not that big and this dude is not that fast.

“I just knew, last year, people’s appreciation for me was kinda going away. I took all that hard. I tried to stay in my routine. I wasn’t going to be a bad teammate. That ain’t me. In the back of my mind, though, I knew.”

The root of that passion

Mathieu brought a friend, Terrell McCall, to the brunch at Bearcat Cafe, and early into the conversation, Mathieu turned to him with a smile, the recognition that a story is on the way. One of those stories only tight friends can truly appreciate.

Mathieu and McCall have known each other since high school. On occasion, when Mathieu speaks, he begins a sentence, “And he and I have talked a lot about this,” nodding his head across the table. McCall, who played football with Mathieu in high school — and played in the band, an important note for this anecdote — later followed him to Louisiana State University for college studies.

So, the story: When Mathieu moved to the defensive side of the football in high school after spending his freshman season playing running back for the ninth-grade team, McCall had 17 tackles in a game. Mathieu remembers the number. A detail is rarely lost in his story.

His coach came into a meeting one morning the next week, using McCall’s game as an example, and shouted, This is how you play football.

“And you know me,” Mathieu said, “I take everything personal. I been that way.

“So, I’m like, Coach, this dude used to be in the band. I mean, come on, man.”

McCall and Mathieu laugh at the kicker to this tale, as though they’ve laughed about the story a hundred times before. But there’s a point to it.

Mathieu has grown in very public ways since high school — and since college, in particular — but some things don’t change. In a world in which his peers make a living out of taking things personally, Mathieu stretches the limit — and, at times, plows right past it.

His childhood taught him to protect what he does have, a mechanism for blocking out what he does not.

It’s part of the root of his greatness on a football team, part of what doesn’t show up in his statistics, part of why Kansas City initially fell in love with him. Mathieu was the unquestioned vocal leader of a position group that opted for youth at every other spot. He’s an ideal teammate who was tasked with reforming the attitude of the Chiefs’ defense in 2019 and eventually followed through on that promise.

His presence may be literally absent from the locker room next season, but its reverberations will be felt for years to come.

“I hear everything a coach says. I think that’s why I’m so coachable,” Mathieu says. “Something in me just has to sit in the front row and be like, all right, I know this dude is talking to me. He told the defensive end to do that? I still know he’s talking to me.”

It’s been that way for awhile, in other words, and if we’re thinking alike here — so that explains his Twitter feed — yes, that came up in the conversation. At one point last season, in case you’re unfamiliar, Mathieu stood in front of a microphone and apologized for interactions he’d had with fans on social media.

It wasn’t the first time. He spent much of the year trading barbs with complete strangers, to the point where you couldn’t help but ask: Is this even healthy?

In reflection, no, it wasn’t.

“I think I just got caught in a bad space,” Mathieu says. “I knew the Chiefs weren’t going to sign me, and I woke up every day with that on my mind. I knew I wanted to get another contract. You work toward all those things. You take that (stuff) serious. That’s the only reason I was able to do what I did — because I took it serious. I care that much. The dudes who don’t care half of what I care — they ain’t got nothing to show for it. What we accomplished the last three years, they have been part of it, but they ain’t got (anything) to show for it.

“Passion, it’s a good thing and a bad thing, you know what I’m saying? You can get to the point where you’re like, dude, what are you doing? I think I was just caught in that space where I was trying to prove myself to everybody — especially when I realized I wasn’t signing. That carried throughout the season. I was just in a bad, bad space.”

The person behind the player

Mathieu is in town to see some old friends, like McCall, along with some family, but he’s also visiting LSU multiple times. New head coach Brian Kelly asked him to speak to the team. Mathieu threw out the first pitch at a Tigers baseball game.

How many guys who get kicked off the school’s football team are treated like royalty once they return?

That’s actually part of why they want him here. Mathieu is a success story, and a unique one. The “Honey Badger,” as he was called, was dismissed from the LSU football team after failing drug tests, not long after he had been a Heisman Trophy finalist. He entered rehab, re-enrolled in LSU a month later to at least continue his education, and then got arrested again. He’d invited the police into his home, not realizing a friend had marijuana in his book bag.

Within a week, Mathieu moved to Miami and began working out and training for the NFL Draft with the father of college teammate Patrick Peterson.

It’s a bit ironic that what cast a dark shadow on his college career is a widely accepted cultural norm now — “I like to think I was ahead of my time,” he quips — but he has no hard feelings about that. The dismissal, he believes, turned his life around.

It’s part of what brings him to Baton Rouge this week, talking to the LSU football team about the mixture of drugs and ambition. But first, the coaching staff asked Mathieu for guidance in trying to get through to someone like 19- and 20-year-old Tyrann Mathieu.

And this is where his personality reveals itself.

“You gotta get to know them,” he told them. “Like, really know them. Where they come from, what they like to eat, the way they talk, the way they think.”

And now he’s talking about himself.

“Our environments shape us. Some of us aren’t bad people.”

His environment.

Until Mathieu was 8 or 9, he was actually Tyrann Matthews. That was the name on his birth certificate. “And this is some real New Orleans (stuff),” he says, before launching into another story. A hospital mixed up the name on his grandfather’s bracelet once, or that’s how the family tale goes, before an uncle did some research and realized that, wait a minute, the name is actually Mathieu. The entire family had to re-do some paperwork.

Mathieu was raised initially by his maternal grandmother before moving in with his Aunt Sheila and Uncle Tyrone Mathieu for grade school. His grandmother never had it easy. She buried three children. Buried her husband, too. She is responsible for the foundation.

“I was a grandma’s baby,” Mathieu says. “I think just being around her, laying on her chest every day as a baby, a lot of her spirit and energy just dwell on me.”

Mathieu’s father has been serving a life sentence for second-degree murder since Mathieu was 18 months old. Mathieu has spent the past three years talking to judges and district attorneys about bringing his father home. That’s an uphill battle.

His mom left early, making the choice to hand him off to his grandmother as a baby, something that sticks with him.

And maybe that’s a little of what bothers him so much now, even if he doesn’t make that connection out loud.

His life has cruelly prepared him for what he’s feeling now. Or what he was feeling until about two weeks ago. Want to understand how he flipped that switch? Take his own words.

Environment.

“As heartbroken as I am, and I’m talking about real heartbroken, I’m grateful,” he says. “I’m grateful to play at the level I did. I’m grateful to develop some strong relationships with some good people — players and coaches who still texted me just this morning.”

Mathieu wants to be a coach someday. Being the head boss at LSU would be a dream. He doesn’t think he could coach in the NFL. And this is another place in which his personality reveals itself.

“The NFL business, sometimes they gotta mess up the good guys,” he says. ”My heart just don’t do that. I’m not about to cut a guy on his birthday. It’s just not gonna happen.”

Here he sits, a month or so shy of turning 30, at one more crossroads because of the business. He understands the business, to be sure, but has found it difficult to reconcile.

“Kansas City, it was cool, man,” he says. “I enjoyed it. It flew by.

“I just wish it was a little longer, you know what I’m saying?”

This story was originally published April 8, 2022 at 5:00 AM.

Sam McDowell

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4869

Sam McDowell is a columnist for The Star who has covered Kansas City sports for more than a decade. He has won national awards for columns, features and enterprise work. The Headliner Awards named him the 2024 national sports columnist of the year.