Why Patrick Mahomes got fired up in Chiefs’ preseason loss: ‘I want guys to understand’
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes dropped back to throw all of two passes Sunday afternoon, and not one but both of them were designed tosses to the running back.
That’s the best way to say it was all typically preseason vanilla in the Chiefs’ 26-24 exhibition loss to New Orleans, and it was a pretty stark difference from the last time the Chiefs stepped on a football field — you know, to play in a Super Bowl.
Except, wait, it’s the final quarter; the fourth-string quarterback has just scrambled for 30 yards down the middle of the field; and here’s the league’s reigning regular-season and Super Bowl MVP skipping down the sideline and waving his arm like a third-base coach for the rest of the team to join him.
OK, but otherwise, these preseason games can drag on. The beauty is in the individual stories — Justyn Ross catching a touchdown in his first competitive game in 21 months — but you’re watching a lot of players who won’t be wearing a Chiefs uniform once the games count. How much does it really matter, right?
Except, wait, there’s Nikko Remigio, an undrafted free agent who is eighth or ninth on the wide receiver depth chart, hauling in a 19-yard catch in the fourth quarter; and that reigning MVP quarterback is once more racing down the sideline while donning a visor and slapping him across the back to celebrate.
“He just never stops,” safety Justin Reid would later say.
He feels like he can’t afford to stop. Which is the point here.
The Chiefs’ starters were bad Sunday in New Orleans. The offense didn’t cross midfield in its only possession. The defense looked like Bob Sutton put on the headset for a quarter.
It’s only the preseason, so it doesn’t really matter. The Chiefs will still be 0-0 when they open against the Detroit Lions and drop a Super Bowl banner at their home stadium in a few weeks.
But trace back to last year at this time, with the Chiefs coming off an AFC Championship Game loss rather than a Super Bowl victory. Virtually every conversation I had with people in the organization started with the quarterback’s focus. They’d never seen him like this. “The ‘Be great’ is back,” coach Andy Reid has said.
Every. Single. Play.
So, no, a series of sprints up and down the sideline of a preseason game that none of us will remember in a month isn’t some funny story. It’s required strategy.
“Even though it’s a preseason game, you have to have that same energy you have in the regular season,” Mahomes said. “I think you saw that we came out, and they had more energy than we did.”
And if there’s anything an exhibition game can teach us, it’s that it’s going to be a heck of a lot harder to generate that energy in 2023 than it was in 2022.
The Chiefs didn’t play a regular-season game Sunday, to be sure. And they’re lucky that’s the case — because they didn’t treat it like one, either.
Nearly a month ago, as the Chiefs reported for training camp in St. Joseph, I mentioned this topic as the team’s biggest challenge this season: How can you possibly think every snap of a training camp practice or a preseason game or even a regular-season game is so significant when it comes on the heels of the biggest game of your life?
Because you did last year. And it all worked out.
Or in this case: Because someone reminds you they’re important. Over and over again. That job falls to Mahomes, added to a plate already chock-full of everything on the field.
At some point Sunday, he started letting his teammates know they lacked energy. He mentioned it in the locker room at halftime. Mentioned it on the sideline before it even got to halftime, actually.
The message isn’t that an August game in New Orleans matters. The message is that it all matters.
“I think it’s important, because we’re going to have that target on our back all year,” Mahomes said. “Everybody’s going to play their best football against us. If they haven’t the last few years, I want these guys to understand that.
“If we’re not playing our best football from the get-go, we can get in those deficits. I know it’s a mixture of the 1s and 2s today, but when you get down 14-0, it’s hard to win in this league.”
There’s a reason the NFL has spanned two decades without a repeat champion. Sure, it’s hard to win in this league. But it’s harder yet to maintain the edge after you do win. That’s the word — edge — that Reid has repeated often throughout camp, not just to media but inside meeting rooms.
The starters failed in their initial test. And maybe they’re lucky to see its impact, because Mahomes saw it happening in real-time and changed the course of a game from which he’d already been pulled. Who knows the effect he had on this game — though the Chiefs did score 24 consecutive points after falling behind 17-0.
The real point is whether it has an effect on the next — or the next one that actually counts.
This story was originally published August 13, 2023 at 5:25 PM.