The story of how Patrick Mahomes did 2 things he’d never done and Chiefs won Super Bowl
Patrick Mahomes turned a sport on its side from the beginning, his outrageous talent melding with his perfect coach to transform a league built on parity into one with a marketing plan built on his shoulders.
When he first came to Kansas City three years ago, he knew it was in two states and had a lot of barbecue and that was about it. People told him about the Chiefs’ sorry postseason history. He listened. He always listens. He did not seem daunted. He never seems daunted.
The first time he played here, he left grown men with successful careers shaking their heads at the uselessness of defending him like normal quarterbacks. The first season he was his team’s starter he won the league’s MVP award.
The first time he played in the postseason, he delivered the first AFC Championship Game in the 47-year history of Arrowhead Stadium. The second year he was even better, even if the stats didn’t show it, and after his kneecap slid back in place he took the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl in 50 years.
All of which is a four-paragraph version of this: By the time the Chiefs played the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV at Miami, Mahomes had done virtually everything imaginable in his short career ... except for two things.
He had not won the Super Bowl, and he had not ever played poorly.
‘It’s just team’
This is a story of how he came to do both in the same night — he struggled for three quarters (even by a normal human quarterback’s standards), then played like Patrick Mahomes for about 9 minutes, and then lifted the Lombardi Trophy as a Super Bowl champion because that was enough.
“It’s just team,” Mahomes said. “We have heart. That’s just from day one. Coach Reid pushes us to be the best people we can be, and we never give up.”
Watching Mahomes as a mediocre quarterback was weird, like your favorite band playing all the wrong notes. On the Chiefs’ first possession, he threw a simple third-down pass too hard for Damien Williams to catch and too inaccurately for the speed to matter.
He missed passes over the middle and passes toward the sideline. When the Chiefs’ offense is on, it can feel like watching a great basketball team sprinting down the court for dunks and swished three-pointers. But when the timing is off — or, more accurately in this case, when the opponent is mauling the inside of the Chiefs’ offensive line — it can feel like a glitch.
Midway through the third quarter, the Chiefs trailing and without a point in 78 minutes of real time, Mahomes fumbled and threw an interception on consecutive snaps. The interception may have been the worst single throw of Mahomes’ career:
He drifted to his right, hoping to carry the linebacker in coverage on third and 12. But his eyes never moved. He threw to Tyreek Hill, who was surrounded by five defenders, including linebacker Fred Warner in the No. 54 Niners jersey.
The truth is that play never had a chance. The 49ers had been pressuring Mahomes consistently, even without blitzing, so the Chiefs kept Williams and tight end Blake Bell in for protection. That gave Mahomes enough time — he threw after about four seconds, though DeForest Buckner was closing fast — but left three receivers trying to beat seven defenders in well-shaped zone coverage.
Mahomes’ all-time arm talent and growing list of highlights keep many from realizing he is among the game’s best at avoiding mistakes. He had never before thrown a postseason interception. During the regular season, he threw just one in every 121 passes. Only Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers was better in this area. Mahomes should’ve thrown this ball away.
He knew it then, he knows it now.
“I knew it right as I threw the ball that it wasn’t going to be a good thing,” Mahomes said. “It hit him right between the 5 and the 4, so that’s never good.”
Mahomes threw another interception on the Chiefs’ next possession, this one a combination of an imperfect throw and some bad luck. At that point, Mahomes had completed 18 of 29 passes for 172 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions — that’s a 49.8 passer rating.
It was the worst he’d ever played as a pro, it was happening on the biggest stage he’d ever reach, and because with Mahomes everything seems to be a way for him to be great, it led to perhaps his best moment.
“He was telling us to believe,” Hill said. “He’d seen it in some guys’ eyes — they were getting down, including myself. I was like, ‘Man, how are we going to pull this off?’ And he was like, ‘10, you’ve got to believe, brother. Like the same faith you’ve had all of your career, you’ve got to believe right now. It’s going to happen, man. I can feel it.’ He brought the guys together.”
From that moment on, Mahomes and his teammates played as close to perfect as football at its highest level is allowed to be. They trailed by 10 with less than 12 minutes left and the 49ers taking the ball, and if some Chiefs fans got themselves through the moment by joking they had the Super Bowl exactly where they wanted it, well, turns out that wasn’t a joke.
San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan is among the game’s most innovative play-callers, and he had been carving the Chiefs to shreds with play-action passes and misdirection runs. As the Chiefs’ defense took the field in that moment, the stakes could not have been higher.
The Chiefs’ defensive coaching staff and personnel had been almost completely flipped since last season. They had been given the first half of the 2019 season to work out the kinks, and had surrendered the fewest points in the league over their last six games. All of that represented preparation for this exact moment.
They gave up one first down on a slick design that freed star 49ers tight end George Kittle over the middle, and then they dominated: a first-down run stuffed when the Chiefs flooded the line of scrimmage; a second-down pass that was both well covered by corner Bashaud Breeland and thrown too high because of pressure on a blitz by linebacker Anthony Hitchens; and a third-down pass play covered so well that 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo bailed and scrambled despite KC defensive back Rashad Fenton being in position to force him out of bounds.
A possession for the ages
The Chiefs’ next possession might be the most important in their franchise’s history, keyed by the beautiful combination of Mahomes’ mind, brain and spirit. He’d already lifted Hill with his words, and then he went to work on Chiefs coach Andy Reid with his brain.
Reid has always empowered his quarterbacks to help shape game plans, and he’s stretched those boundaries even further with Mahomes. The quarterback loved a play they called 2-3 Jet Chip Wasp and knew that running a version of it in the first half set up the Chiefs for a big moment now.
That came in the form of a third and 15 from their own 35, the call sending tight end Travis Kelce intermediate to hold a defender and allowing Hill to sprint at Jimmie Ward, knowing he expected a post, and then slam inside at the hash mark to create what felt like an acre of separation. The protection held up enough, so Mahomes leaned on his back foot, chucked the ball 57 yards in the air downfield and the Chiefs had a championship-changing gain.
“They were playing this kind of robber coverage all game long where the safety was coming down and kind of robbing all our deep cross routes,” Mahomes said. “So we had a good play-call on it where we had Kelce do a little stutter deep cross. And we had Tyreek getting one-on-one with that safety.”
From there: a short touchdown to Kelce, another punt forced by the defense, a third-down rollout touchdown pass (thrown over former teammate Dee Ford) to Williams, a fourth-down stop by the defense that effectively won the game, and (what the heck) one more touchdown just to make sure.
The maddening thing about football is that a rotten few plays can wipe out a hundred positives. The thrill of football is that an effectively perfect 12 minutes can push 48 lost minutes straight into irrelevancy, other than serving as prelude to a franchise’s greatest moments and a young quarterback’s ultimate triumph.
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.