Are Chiefs fans becoming numb to the consistent greatness of Patrick Mahomes?

One of the most common symptoms of the human condition is losing track of the present. So often we find ourselves dwelling in the past, conjuring the "damnit, I should have handled that this way" or wishing that maybe we would have invested that money instead of spending it on that new golf club that still hasn't fixed your game. Sometimes the past will even lead to you replaying past conversations in the shower, creating an alternate ending, and finally winning that argument with your coworker. Living too much in the future leads you to mostly anxious thoughts, as long-term as "When am I going to be able to retire?" or as short-term as "I wonder if my one-year-old is going to sleep tonight?"

Do you know where most happiness is found in the human experience? Right where you are. In the present. Kansas City Chiefs fans can relate to this in a big way. When you think about the past, you get a sense of regret or a pit in your stomach remembering all of the heartache we've collectively experienced. Maybe from the years of 1994 to 2012, you cursed the team time and time again. Said you'd never see a Super Bowl winner. You thought being an NFL fan was pointless; hopefully, you had a team in another sport or league that was more successful.

Conversely, if you live too far in the future as a Chiefs fan, you may worry about what the team will do once Travis Kelce, Andy Reid, and Patrick Mahomes are gone. Maybe you're concerned that Reid is grooming Matt Nagy as his replacement, since we've all seen what he did as the head guy in Chicago. Perhaps the Chiefs' past experiences with quarterbacks are more of the norm and Mahomes is the once-in-a-generation exception. Not every franchise can have the Packers' luck at QB. Guess what? That is all irrelevant, and we ultimately have no control over any of it.

What we can control is our focus on the present: where the team is today, and what we are actually witnessing. Throughout the last 6 seasons from 2018 to 2023, we have witnessed the beginning of one of the greatest careers in the history of any level of professional sports. What Patrick Mahomes has managed to do in the first six years of his career has both blown our minds and seemingly made us numb to greatness—the expectation has become win it all, or it was all for nothing. Before the past few seasons, who would have ever predicted this as our reality?

Well, here we are. And with introductory soap box use of the past and the future as places that conjure negative thoughts and emotions, I'd be missing the point completely if I didn't acknowledge that one of those places (the past) is an important barometer to measuring Patrick Mahomes' achievements. You can take any metric you want when it comes to winning and compare Mahomes' torrid pace through 6 seasons as a starter to the pace anyone in league history has set. Hell, at this point you can compare his first 6 seasons under center in Kansas City to a lot of Hall of Fame careers.

Mahomes' 15 career playoff wins are more than Terry Bradshaw, Peyton Manning, and John Elway (14 each). If I wanted to drive the point home, I would point out the entire list of QBs that Mahomes has more playoff wins than, but you didn't come here to read a Wikipedia page. The three mentioned above are all enshrined in Canton. There are 23 more Hall of Fame quarterbacks who Mahomes has outpaced thus far in playoff wins. Names like Brett Favre, Troy Aikman, Roger Staubach, Bart Starr, Kurt Warner, jim Kelly, and Steve Young are among them. There are only 2 quarterbacks who have more than Mahomes: Joe Montana (16) and Tom Brady (35). With 2 playoff victories this season, Mahomes will pass Montana with the potential to match him in Super Bowl trophies. He will be 29 years old if and when that happens.

There have been 246 different quarterbacks that have started at least 1 playoff game in the history of the NFL. Being third on the list of playoff wins already put Patrick Mahomes in the top 1.2% of NFL quarterbacks all time when it comes to playoff success. Of players with at least 10 playoff starts, his .833 winning percentage (15-3) is the best. The same is true for players with at least 9, 8, and 7 playoff starts.

re we becoming numb to the fact that Patrick Mahomes is about to start another season in an already historic career?

Statistically speaking, Mahomes has a ways to go before he's in the Pantheon of passing yards or touchdown leaders all time. Brett Favre and Peyton Manning have more than 70,000 career yards with Drew Bress and Tom Brady both being north of the 80K mark. But Mahomes 4,737 yards per season as a starter is significantly higher than Brady (3,879 YPS), Brees (4,017 YPS), and Manning (3,997 YPS). If he plays for 20 seasons, that would project out to over 90,000 passing yards, even including his first season where he only started one game.

Mahomes can have down years like 2023 when the Chiefs receiving corps was lackluster at best and Travis Kelce spent much of the year banged up and still put up over 4,000 yards passing even while sitting the season's final week. Yet we're not watching a guy who plays for stats. We're watching a player who plays to win. After all, Mahomes is only 8th all-time in playoff passing yards. To be fair, the only real comparison in yards per game in that conversation is Drew Brees, who matches Mahomes 18 playoff starts but surpasses him in yards by 231. Brees also played 13 more seasons than Mahomes currently has under his belt.

The most telling statistic to me regarding Mahomes' greatness happens to reside in the most jaw-dropping moments that the QB has provided us in his young career. Check out the following from Neil Paine:

Mahomes has become the best at doing the most impossible things on a football field. When you consider the most successful clutch performers in the history of the sport succeeded at 50% and below at something Mahomes has been flawless at in his young career, it puts things into a proper perspective.

The past is something that lends us the comparative tools we need to find the lens with which we view Patrick Mahomes in years to come. We hold these previous great QBs in such high regard that they're nearly god-like figures in the annals of football history. They are the pillars of the sport. Well, Mahomes is not just the best quarterback in today's NFL. He is a living legend at the age of 28, and if the way his career has started is any indication of how it will go, the future is not something we should fear. Not the near future, anyway.