‘He’s a dog’: How Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is making KC forget about Tyreek Hill
On Sunday evening here in Arizona, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes walked behind a microphone half an hour after torching the Cardinals’ defense in a season-opening win.
You’ll need to know something about him to understand the relevance of what’s coming next. Mahomes has perhaps the fastest response time on the planet to questions hurled toward him in this setting. For as quickly as you think he can make a decision on the football field, I promise you, he’s quicker in a news conference.
That’s almost universally true, except nearly six minutes into his conversation Sunday, he was asked if he had something to prove.
He took a beat. And then another.
Something to prove?
The 26-year-old pondering the question is three hours into his fifth season as an NFL starter, and he’s never not concluded one of those seasons absent an AFC Championship Game. He ended a franchise’s 50-year Super Bowl drought. A regular-season MVP award sits in his trophy case, resting alongside a Super Bowl MVP.
I figured that’s the kind of thing circling through his mind for those couple of seconds, but that he would hold back and opt for the politically correct answer.
And, well:
“I always feel like I have something to prove,” he ultimately replied after throwing for five touchdowns in a 44-21 win in Arizona. So far we’re on target.
But then: “I’m just a guy from Texas Tech, man, that they said couldn’t play in the NFL.”
Here’s where I’ll remind you that Mahomes was the 10th overall selection in a draft with 253 of them — not to mention the scores of others who were not picked at all — and that the Chiefs traded two first-round picks and a third-rounder just for the chance to acquire him.
Maybe it’s revisionist history, but a few other teams insist that, man, they were just about to take him if the Chiefs hadn’t.
So someone out there thought Patrick Mahomes could play in the NFL.
But the fact that, more than half a decade later, he’s holding onto this small thing that someone somewhere did not — well, that gives you insight into why we never should have doubted what came Sunday.
Mahomes put up one of the most dominant sessions of his career, a 30-of-39 day in which he threw for 360 yards and five touchdowns.
Simply put: He was at his best.
In retrospect, easy to say now and all that, but why would we have expected otherwise? His best seems to come from his worst. And his best seems to come when anyone — you, me, his neighbor, some talking head on a national show hoping to get attention — seems to expect anything less than.
On Sunday, he played backed by both. A lethal combination, turns out.
He was at fault for the way that 2021 season ended. The second half of that Bengals games rests on his shoulders as much as any others. When else have we said that?
And then there was the noise: How in the world will this offense march on without Tyreek Hill, the best wide receiver he’s ever had?
“The whole offseason,” Mahomes said, “everybody’s asked us the questions of what this offense, what this team’s going to look like.
“We’ve always believed we were going to go out there and put on a show.”
To hell with blocking out the noise. Embrace it. That’s part of what makes him who he is. Part of what separates him.
Heck, even his own teammates couldn’t help but wonder. When the Chiefs shipped Hill to Miami in the spring, tight end Travis Kelce acknowledged “there was a question” of how it might work out.
That changed — that doubt evaporated — when Kelce took Mahomes up on an invitation to train with him for a few weeks in Texas. Many of the new receivers were coming, too. Kelce noticed something in Mahomes. Noticed something in his new teammates.
“When I saw that going down,” Kelce said, ”... I knew were were gonna be just fine.”
As we tried to assess the most significant personnel changes during the Mahomes Era, we too quickly dismissed the constant.
The Chiefs lost Tyreek Hill. They still have Patrick Mahomes.
The first time he had the ball this season, Mahomes followed coach Andy Reid’s script for a 75-yard touchdown drive. He faced only one third down, and there, he reminded us of his uniqueness on the field, twirling to avoid a blitz before finding JuJu Smith-Schuster for a first down. In 11 plays, we had our answer.
“He’s a dog,” Smith-Schuster said.
His next drive covered 66 yards and found the end zone. The next, 60 and another score. By the end of the night, Mahomes had the second-most touchdowns in his career, his third-best quarterback rating and his eighth-best completion percentage.
Without an appearance from Tyreek Hill. With receptions by nine others. Six of them caught at least three passes.
It’s one test, with 16 others to follow, maybe more. But the one answer didn’t come by accident.
Five years ago, the point at which somebody apparently said Mahomes could not do this, he arrived in Kansas City with help. He had Hill at wide receiver. He had others, too.
At some point, though, that relationship changed. Sure, he still had them. But they had him. There’s a difference.
Somehow that got twisted in all of this.
Mahomes is the constant.
Wouldn’t want to be the one who doubts that’s enough.
This story was originally published September 11, 2022 at 10:35 PM.