Some call it the Michael Jordan effect. A sports player becomes so good that their greatness is often overlooked because people get "tired" of them. That's started to happen with Patrick Mahomes more and more throughout his career. Even during the broadcast of the Kansas City Chiefs win over the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday, Tony Romo said something akin to, "Sometimes we take Patrick Mahomes for granted."
Romo was right. Just last week, one Yahoo! Sports pundit (Frank Schwab) made the case that Mahomes shouldn't be the co-MVP favorite with Tua Tagovailoa. The last line of that story, "Mahomes has a great reputation and deserves it after an unprecedented start to his career. But this season? He shouldn't be in MVP consideration — not yet, anyway."
To the author's credit, he did say "not yet". It only took a couple of days for that to change. That's because on Sunday, against the Chargers, Mahomes put himself firmly back into the MVP discussion with arguably the best game of his season.
At halftime, it seemed like Norm Van Brocklin's single-game passing record might be in real danger as Mahome cruised to over 350 passing yards in the first half alone. He also had three touchdowns. CBS said that hadn't happened since Drew Brees did it in 2015.
Now, all due respect to Tagovailoa, who as the author mentioned was co-favored for MVP, but he did not have nearly the same game against the Eagles as Patrick did against the Chargers. At the time of writing, Tua had 216 passing yards against the Philadelphia Eagles. That total is about half of Mahomes' 424.
So I guess Schwab was right in some respect. Mahomes and Tagovailoa shouldn't be co-favored. It took all of one week to show that Mahomes is still the best quarterback in the NFL. If the Chiefs offense was finally unlocked on Sunday, it should be smooth sailing for Mahomes to another MVP and the team to another Arrowhead Invitational.