Patrick Mahomes is a rarity on and off the field—a superstar personality who is also a living, breathing meme—and deserves to be crowned accordingly.
Patrick Mahomes’s ascent has been fascinating.
That’s not just a commentary on his performance on the field, where he’s shot-putting the ball left-handed, slinging no-look passes on the move, and doing other downright stupid/great stuff the likes of which the NFL has never seen.
In the context of the NFL and football as a whole, Mahomes’s rise as a pop cultural figure is unique in how driven it has been by the internet’s ethos of viral creativity and immediacy. He’s the first truly great NFL superstar who, at least at the moment, is also a living, breathing meme. In 2018 and beyond, that’s basically a license to print currency—both social and the actual, tangible stuff you can use to buy goods and services, like ketchup or a butler who brings you ketchup.
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The power in Mahomes’s meme-hood is two-fold. Between his hair (finding that delicate medium between Kenny Powers, Sideshow Bob, and Dr. Steve Brule), and his voice (while often compared to Kermit the Frog, it’s actually closer to if Bobcat Goldthwait voiced a King of the Hill character), he’s an easy celebrity to caricature. Throw on a curly wig with a headband and speak in a gravelly voice and every NFL fan knows who you’re imitating.
On the flip side, his personality is a relative unknown. Mahomes, and I mean this in the absolute best way possible, comes off as kind of a dweeb. He always says the right thing at press conferences. He turns down endorsement deals because he feels he should win first. He’d rather stay at home and watch a film or play Fortnite. He can’t dance. He’s basically a blank slate off the field. Which, when coupled with his vocal eccentricities and magician-like quarterback play, is perfect for his near-instant rise as both a legitimate superstar and the NFL’s resident mythical being. It allows the internet to imbue him with whatever personality they want as they create increasingly ridiculous Photoshops and mashups and remixes centered around Mahomes’s voice, hair, love of ketchup, 65-yard bombs, or all of the above.
The less he openly capitalizes on the internet’s love of him, the better. The moment he appears in a ketchup commercial, there’s a good chance the joke is dead. The moment he’s overexposed is the moment, he’s no longer fun. That’s the trickiest aspect of capitalizing on a meme—the mere act of capitalizing on it makes the whole thing feel inauthentic. What made it a meme in the first place was the organic spread of jokes and ideas through social media, and taking that grassroots form of expression and directly packaging it as an advertisement can backfire as far as the audience’s willingness to continue to play along goes.
Take the “It’s a Tide ad” campaign. The reason it worked and the reason it was such a success wasn’t just that it was a clever concept. It was also that they got internet darling David Harbour to do it. There’s a reason that same campaign is cringe-inducing on Thursday Night Football when Joe Buck and Troy Aikman do it. With Harbour, there was a distinct air of self-awareness that’s lost with Buck and Aikman. Once the internet seemed to love the Harbour ads, Tide started doubling-down on them. That’s when they started feeling like a cynical advertisement again. The trick to good advertising in the social media age is making something just weird enough for the internet to take hold of it and do your job for you by remixing it themselves.
Mahomes’s best course of action is the one he’s on right now—let the internet meme him, let the ketchup companies send him gift packages, and continue to let social media’s version of him exist separate from the real him. Don’t let the two meet very often, if at all. The less he openly capitalizes on it, the bigger legend he’ll become.
That’s one half of the reason the “crowning” of Patrick Mahomes is fully justified—his off the field meme status as a superstar is entirely organic and only partly has to do with his play on the field. If the internet didn’t find him to be just a little bit silly (in that wonderful Python-esque way), he’d never have exploded quite the way he has. The NFL fan base’s obsession with him has just as much to do with the breath of fresh air he represents as a character as it does him as a player. Mahomes the cartoon is just as big a star as Mahomes the quarterback.
But he still is a player, so let’s look at why it’s OK to celebrate his play on the field as well, regardless of the argument that some would raise claiming it’s “too soon.”
Mahomes’s rise has placed his name in the hot take echo-chamber, where the same four or five arguments are manufactured and repurposed for nearly every possible scenario. They’re attached to a story and pitted against each other in fake debates between loud personalities. The Baylessization of sports banter has only spread more rapidly with the growth and trickle into the mainstream of internet and meme culture. These hot takes are simply broad strokes with zero nuance designed to be easily questioned, refuted, or otherwise poked through with so many holes they could be mistaken for swiss cheese, the plot of any time travel movie, or the claim that Colin Kaepernick isn’t on an NFL roster because he’s “a bad quarterback”.
The idea is to present an argument so based on emotion, assumption, and cliche that even the most uninformed viewer can call B.S. on it. This makes it easy for Twitter to get ahold of it and get these pundits over as heroes or villains. Make no mistake about it—Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd, and similar hot take artists want you to clown them and point out how often they flip-flop or hold two seemingly incompatible opinions simultaneously. They’re doing it on purpose.
Since I’ve already mentioned him twice, let’s use Skip Bayless as an example, since he’s been one of the conductors on the “it’s too early to crown Patrick Mahomes” train.
His stance this season is that Mahomes has been on a “magic carpet ride” where everything goes right and almost nothing goes wrong. He recently compared Mahomes’s 4th and 9 bomb to Tyreek Hill against Baltimore to the David Tyree Helmet Catch. He posits it was closed-eye prayer Mahomes chucked to no one in particular, hoping it’d be caught. It doesn’t seem to matter that multiple angles of the play show Mahomes seeing Hill finding open space before he fires the pass.
He dings Mahomes’s MVP credibility because he lost to Tom Brady. Of course, at no point last year did Bayless call for Alex Smith, who beat Brady, to be ahead of Brady in the MVP race. In Bayless’ world, losing to Tom Brady is always a massive shot to your credibility in comparison to Brady, but beating Brady usually amounts to a fluke.
This is the same man who has spent all season ripping Aaron Rodgers (his second-favorite pastime to ripping LeBron James) for not taking enough chances. This is the same man who has spent the entire Cold Pizza, First Take, and Undisputed portions of his career extolling the virtues of Brett Favre’s gunslinging, never-say-die mentality. At one point he labeled Favre a top five player of all time. But when Patrick Mahomes emerges as a player who can be somewhat aptly described as “Brett Favre if Brett Favre paid attention during film study”, suddenly gunslinging and taking chances is bad? Suddenly the same thing he’s been demanding of Aaron Rodgers is a negative?
The trick, of course, is that Bayless doesn’t actually believe his own arguments; he has to be anti-Mahomes because that’s what the heel would do.
So what’s all this mean? It means “it’s too early to crown Patrick Mahomes” is a disingenuous argument. No one is saying he’s eclipsed any all-time QB. No one is even saying he’s eclipsed any mediocre journeyman QB with solid career numbers. The “crowning” of Mahomes has been people saying his performance to date is unprecedented. That’s just an objective fact. No quarterback has done what he’s done this quickly. His numbers this season put him in a camp with only two other quarterbacks: Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. You don’t join that company on a fluke. You don’t join that company exclusively on the power of your supporting cast. If you did, Daunte Culpepper and Kurt Warner would be there too. Yet as good as they were, they didn’t put up these numbers with their elite supporting casts.
In reality, this debate about Patrick Mahomes’s status as one of the best quarterbacks in the league isn’t real. It’s theater. Sports debate feels it needs the formula of a loud, ludicrously wrong guy shouting bad opinions pitted against a guy who reacts in perfectly GIF-able, flabbergasted expressions. It’s a show. It’s emotion. It’s fake.
What’s real is Patrick Mahomes—both the internet-created pop culture figure and the generational football talent. Both are undeniably, uniquely, once-in-a-lifetime great. That’s true now, it’ll be true tomorrow, and it’ll be true until the sun consumes the planet and our entire history is wiped away. Because even if he somehow wakes up Week 1 of the 2019 season a completely different quarterback and is total garbage for the rest of his career, right now, in 2018, he deserves his crown.