A new era of football is going to have Mahomes, Reid, and the Chiefs as its genesis. There’s simply no way that era plays out without a Super Bowl.
Finally, at long last, I’ve awoken from my traditional 96-hour post-Kansas City Chiefs playoff loss depression nap and moved onto my equally traditional month-long binge of eating my feelings via frequent trips to the convenience store for oversized sprinkled sugar cookies.
Typically, the image I project in January of a grown man solemnly walking the sidewalks home while eating a giant rainbow confection is one of someone wallowing in the misery of knowing the window has closed for his favorite football team. Any real happiness will continue to elude him. Like most football fans, I’m never going to come to terms with the real source of my perpetual woes being the outsourcing of the responsibility of my happiness to something as arbitrary as a sports team. I’m far more comfortable being angry at Bob Sutton than I am doing any actual self-reflection.
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This January is a little different. I’m still burying my sorrow in heavily processed, brightly colored baked goods. And I’m still fending off any actual analysis of the true root of that sorrow with Zorro-like precision. What’s different this year is the certainty I have that the perpetual post-loss low that has served so well in allowing me to live vicariously through a football team will soon be replaced by a post-victory high that will be so great it might even get me to kick the cookies not gain those extra 10 pounds every January.
The reason for that certainty should be fairly obvious: Patrick Mahomes.
Mahomes has been compared to plenty of Hall of Fame level quarterbacks. Brett Favre and Arron Rodgers are among the most frequent comparisons, and at a glance, his game does resemble what might happen if you spliced the football DNA of Favre and Rodgers.
Another quarterback who Mahomes is likened to is Dan Marino. Naturally, Marino’s strong arm and incredible early-career production have linked the two. Marino, of course, never won a Super Bowl, and his career trajectory is serving as a cautionary tale for those viewing Mahomes’ first playoff exit as just an early stumbling block for a quarterback so great he’s given his franchise a 15-year window to win multiple championships.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of worrying about the future as an entirely unpredictable monster. It’s understandable to treat the end of the most recent Chiefs’ playoff run as yet another missed opportunity that may not come around again.
Football is complicated, certainly far more involved than it seems from the outside looking in. The sport is presented as gladiators colliding in a test of strength, rather than the complex game of chess it is underneath all that. This makes sense, given it’s much easier to market the former to the average viewer than the latter. But like the much-tougher-than-today video games of the ’80s and ’90s, some kids have the cheat codes and can get to the final boss without much effort.
The reality is the Chiefs have a formula in place that virtually guarantees at least one Super Bowl visit: a great coach + a great quarterback on a rookie contract. Just having the great QB on a team-friendly contract is nearly good enough on its own, but combine that with having one of the league’s brightest coaches in Andy Reid, and you may as well consider that a cheat code that grants the Chiefs immediate access to the AFC Championship game every year.
Marino was great, but he was also frequently under the knife for offseason surgeries and never had a core of weapons around him like Mahomes does (few QBs have). Marino also had his best years in the ’80s. It should go without saying that the game is radically different today, both in scheme and in the level at which the league both protects its quarterbacks and inflates offenses.
The 2018 Chiefs had one of the most abysmal defenses in recent memory. Despite a fearsome pass rush, they could never manage to stop the run or challenge receivers downfield. They were an absolute sieve that consistently had trouble getting stops in the most important moments of games. And despite that, Mahomes and the Chiefs’ offense had the team an overtime coin toss away from going to the Super Bowl. That isn’t the sign of a team who blew an opportunity. That’s the sign of quarterback and head coach creating an opportunity where there otherwise wouldn’t be one. Unless you’re going to argue Mahomes is going to fall off of a cliff, which there is no real evidence for, there’s nothing this team can do but get better.
Getting better doesn’t exclusively apply to the defense. Mahomes and the offense were consistently, noticeably out of sync in the first halves of multiple impactful games this year. Despite Mahomes being labeled as a quarterback cool under pressure at a level beyond his years, that always managed to come only after spending the first half overthrowing wide open touchdowns and seeming to forget entirely how to throw the ball with touch or finesse. If the second halves of these games displayed a young quarterback already mastering clutch moments, the first halves displayed a quarterback who let the moment make him far too jittery and anxious. If Mahomes had learned how to be cool for a full 60 minutes, the Chiefs would probably be preparing for a Super Bowl right now, even with their defensive ineptitude.
And that’s not a knock on Mahomes, for the record. He’s obviously far exceeded any rational expectations for a 23-year-old first-time NFL starter. But acknowledging that he still has stuff to work on means he can only get better, which should be absolutely terrifying to every other NFL team.
This also means the pressure is now really on for the Chiefs. Starting next season, as long as the team remains reasonably healthy, anything other than a Super Bowl victory won’t just be a disappointment, it will be a failure. For the first time perhaps ever, this isn’t a “could win with” team. This is a “should win with” team.
As easy as it may be as Chiefs fans to look at Marino and shudder at the thought of a career of greatness squandered, Mahomes isn’t Marino. He isn’t Favre, he isn’t Rodgers, he isn’t comparable to anyone. When Mahomes was being scouted for the draft, the general consensus was he was talented but would have to change to find success in the NFL. The truth was the NFL was going to have to change for him. There’s no need to explain why; you know the stats, and you’ve seen him play. Losing to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick doesn’t erase that.
An entirely new era of football is going to have Mahomes, Reid, and the Chiefs as its genesis. There’s simply no way that era plays out without a Super Bowl for Kansas City.