How Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco honors his late brother and sister with his play
Untouched but for a glancing arm in the backfield on Sunday at MetLife Stadium, Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco took a handoff, juked, stagger-stepped, cut and zoomed untouched 48 yards ... and, to quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ eye, levitated over the end zone.
“I don’t know if his feet ever landed,” Mahomes said, smiling.
Just another way the living, breathing perpetual motion machine almost literally never stops moving.
Start with furiously churning into traffic and bolting right back up, dancing in the end zone — or at any given time — and even sprinting to the locker room after the game.
In that 23-20 victory over the Jets on Sunday, Pacheco even rattled off pushups — an old habit — after being tackled, to “get my energy back,” as he put it after amassing a career-best 158 yards of total offense.
Pacheco’s “Energizer Bunny” element, as Chiefs coach Andy Reid has called it and Rutgers coach Greg Schiano put it Thursday, is infectious stuff, anyone with the Chiefs will tell you. And Pacheco’s high school coach, Dan Russo, and Schiano punctuated that point during Thursday phone interviews with The Star.
From the moment he saw him in youth football, Russo said, he was “blown away” by everything about Pacheco: his speed, to be sure, but the charisma and energy and “that juice” that compounded his skill-set and radiated everywhere around him.
“It’s like electricity,” Russo said.
And not just when the lights are on.
“As I told every NFL scout who came through here, he’s the hardest-working practice player I’ve ever coached,” Schiano said. “And that’s 36 years of some really good players.”
Isiah Pacheco earns ‘Pop’ nickname
If there’s any downside to this uncontainable energy, it’s that you occasionally “have to calm him down,” as Mahomes put it.
Pacheco is still only grudgingly learning the discretion of when to avoid contact instead of feeling like he has to prove his toughness every single moment. His nickname, “Pop,” comes from knocking out an opponent in a youth game, and it took forever for Russo to get him to consider running out of bounds when his momentum was taking him that way.
Meanwhile, Schiano frets that even the admirable habit of rapidly getting back on his feet might make him more susceptible to injury.
“Sometimes he gets up so fast,” Schiano said, “people don’t even know he was down.”
There’s a telling and even poignant parallel to that point in the very life of Pacheco, who grew up in Vineland, New Jersey.
Asked on Wednesday from where this zeal came, he spoke of love of the game and never being satisfied and wanting to show anyone watching, “I ain’t tired.”
While that passion is innate or otherwise long ingrained in him, it’s also catalyzed by piercing losses in his life: the murders in separate incidents in 2016 and 2017 of two beloved older siblings.
“He had some really tough things happen to him, traumatic things happen to him, in his life,” Schiano said. “But I think that’s what makes ‘Pop’ who he is. He’s a fighter, and he’s not going to let things keep him down.”
And then the Rutgers coach added, “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect him.”
Of all the painful ways it forever will, though, one part is this:
“It motivated me to go 10 times harder,” Pacheco said during a Zoom interview with local media after the Chiefs picked him in the seventh round of the 2022 NFL Draft — a selection that would become a stunning bargain.
Playing for brother, sister who died
When he arrived in Kansas City as part of what became a remarkably prosperous draft class linked by tragedy and tribulation that formed and drove them, Pacheco spoke of the active presence of his late brother (Travoise) and sister (Celeste) in his life.
“My confidence comes from my hardships,” he said, adding that he wanted to make them proud when they’re “looking down on me” by playing hard for them and his family.
Impossibly, he began signifying that intention days after Celeste’s murder in September 2017 — some 19 months after Travoise was killed.
Russo recalled urging Pacheco to take off as much time as he wanted or needed after Celeste’s death.
But Pacheco, he said, was “adamant” about playing.
In Vineland’s 42-6 win over Egg Harbor Township, the four-year captain and starting quarterback rushed for 222 yards, threw for two touchdowns and returned a punt 79 yards for a touchdown.
A week later, hours after Celeste’s funeral, Pacheco rushed for 157 yards and scored three touchdowns in a 60-6 win over Cumberland.
After that game, the South Jersey Times wrote that everyone else on the field seemed in slow motion compared to Pacheco, even as he mourned.
“I did this for my sister,” he said afterward. “I’m happy this game is over. I’ll admit it. I’ll probably go home and have a nice cry later. I’ll probably cry myself to sleep tonight.”
He’s been doing them proud ever since, from Vineland to Rutgers to Kansas City.
While the likes of Notre Dame and Ohio State offered him scholarships to play defensive back, Russo said, Pacheco was determined to be a running back.
Not to mention partial to playing near home, where he was honored with a ceremony and key to the city before his rookie season, and again with his own Super Bowl parade in April.
“That’s ‘Pop,’” Russo said. “He knows what he wants.”
And how to get it. In his own inimitable style, he rushed for 2,442 yards and 18 touchdowns in four seasons at Rutgers.
His 4.37-second 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine made him all the more appealing to the Chiefs. And they got an instant glimpse at his excitability as Pacheco forgot to hang up the phone when general manager Brett Veach called to tell him he was about to be drafted.
When Veach handed the phone to Reid, all the Chiefs coach heard was screaming in celebration.
“Isiah, you there?” Reid asked, smiling and chuckling. “You alive, Isiah?”
Alive like few others, Reid and the Chiefs would soon learn, in part because of how he lives for others.
Something you can see in his every move.