Chiefs The ‘Box’ that protects Mahomes and keeps him normal - Page 2

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The ‘Box’ That Protects Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes and Keeps Him Normal

This season, of victories that taste better than they look, chaos swirls like smoke signal warnings all around the three-time Super Bowl MVP. But in that box, he doesn’t seem to notice.

Patrick Mahomes is still sore, still swollen, injured left ankle wrapped tightly with athletic tape.

It’s early November, the day after Election Day. The Kansas City Chiefs hold perhaps the shakiest 8–0 record in NFL history and now, after Mahomes needed help getting off the field late in a Monday night win over the Buccaneers, they’re dealing with another round of Ankle Watch for their superstar QB.

Only the presidential race generates more headlines. Otherwise, it’s all Patrick-Patrick-Patrick. One outlet details a favorite ritual—Mahomes sharing a brief kiss with his wife before games. Another describes his fifth annual charity gala and its community impact. Another openly wonders if Taylor Swift, notable Chiefs fan, had snubbed the Kamala Harris campaign to be at a game. Another describes Mahomes’s 3-year-old daughter, Sterling, and her charming description of defenders: “So rude."

One headline has Mahomes as being “so back.”

Another notes his “fall” out of the MVP race.

Patrick Mahomes is a proxy for America and its favorite sport. All season, debates have raged around him: his mom’s politics, his wife’s politics, even his politics, the gist of which Mahomes has never publicly revealed. His father was sentenced—10 days in jail, five years’ probation—for driving under the influence of alcohol last February. His mother pleaded for prayers for her father, who had fallen ill and been hospitalized.

And in early November, Mahomes is not playing his best football—not per sources but per him. He is in the middle of the pack among NFL quarterbacks in passing yards and touchdowns. Through eight games, he’s thrown nine interceptions.

The Buffalo Bills would eventually hand the Chiefs a loss in Week 11, but at this point Patrick Mahomes is still undefeated. Including the playoffs and Super Bowl, Kansas City closed out last season with six consecutive victories. He had never won 14 straight games before, Mahomes reveals, at any level of football, and perhaps in any sport he played. Maybe basketball. Maybe baseball. Maybe not. There’s an asterisk on the streak, though—for the first 13 wins, the Chiefs never surpassed 28 points. No franchise had ever won that many consecutive games and scored so few points in each.

Still, let’s not forget, Mahomes is the single best player in professional football. The Kingdom knows this, regardless of how this odd, injury-heavy, bad luck 2024 season has unspooled. He’s still Patrick F---ing Mahomes, right? Thrower of touchdowns. Consumer of Whataburger. Winner of Super Bowls. Devoted dad. Destroyer of souls.

There’s more interest in Mahomes and the Chiefs than there is in any other player or any other team in North America. More than 20 million viewers recorded for K.C.’s victory over Tampa Bay earlier that week, touts a news release from ESPN.

On this Wednesday, Patrick Mahomes is behind a lectern, addressing local media, when one reporter uses the phrase “regular Sunday.” Mahomes lost those years ago, soon after embarking upon an unprecedented start to an NFL career. Normal ceased for Mahomes as soon as he became the most abnormal quarterback in league history.

Did it? Because those who know Mahomes best cannot stop using that word: normal. From his physique (proud dad bod) to his celebratory drink of choice (Coors Light cans) to his favorite snack (Cool Ranch Doritos) to his hobbies (watching sports), there’s little beyond the headlines that paints his day-to-day existence as tied, in any way, to celebrity.

To be sure, there are always headlines. It’s like Mahomes became a member of the British royal family as his career shot skyward. There’s endless scrutiny of his left ankle. Right ankle. Injured receivers. His new target, wideout DeAndre Hopkins, acquired in late October. Injured running backs—and another, Kareem Hunt, who returned six years after he was banished by the Chiefs in disgrace.

Mahomes is the biggest name in the country’s biggest sport, but that’s not how he sees himself. Nor is it how anyone else within his orbit sees him. His normal, Mahomes says in a quiet moment in early November, “is just being yourself. People can see when you’re true and not trying to put on a persona.”

Healthy response. So healthy it cannot possibly be true. But it is, Mahomes insists, pointing to when this mindset started taking shape—during a childhood spent inside Major League Baseball clubhouses. He often tagged along with his father, Patrick Mahomes Sr., who pitched professionally for 11 seasons. In this conversation, his son diverges from more typical responses, all the how-to-succeed elements of a childhood spent around pro athletes. He also learned what not to do from them.

“I grew up in the locker room,” he says. “And I remember—I’m not naming names—seeing a lot of superstars. Some, just, normal guys who loved to be [there], loved to watch sports. Some that, like … it was hard to approach them.”

He cannot recall the exact year, but somewhere in that 6-7-8-years-old range, young Patrick Mahomes made two promises to himself. He will become a professional athlete, just like them. But, when he makes it, he won’t be an a--hole. “I wanted to make sure that kids or anybody could come up to me and talk to me,” he says.

How Mahomes remains so normal for someone with his level of fame and accomplishment starts with those promises. What comes next: that box, the one that he exists in.

Same day. Same place. Chiefs coach Andy Reid settles behind the mic. Outside, sun beams down on the franchise once known for bad luck. Reid’s mustache is in midseason form. His offense, 8–0 record notwithstanding, is lost somewhere in the early-installs stage. He grips the lectern’s sides like he’ll never let go, knuckles turning white.

Been that kind of year, unlike any of the ones before it. The Chiefs keep winning, now 12–1 after another close call against the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday Night Football. But each victory, it seems, only raises more questions, more uncertainty, until Reid’s purpose in public appearances becomes noting that ugly wins, each more fizzle than sizzle, still, you know, count. One year when the Patriots were 8–0, Tom Brady described himself as “miserable.” Not these Chiefs.

If they can secure a championship three-peat this season, nobody’s going to mention any score beyond the Super Bowl, anyway. That’s where they’re pointed. And that push had started with so much promise. On the eve of last February’s Super Bowl, general manager Brett Veach told Sports Illustrated he wasn’t optimistic about keeping his best defensive player, scheme-obliterating tackle Chris Jones.

At the start of the 2023 season, what Kansas City wanted to pay and what it would have to pay for an extension for Jones weren’t in the same galaxy. Other roster movements had closed that gap, naturally but not entirely. Veach soon met with franchise CEO Clark Hunt. “It’s important to keep Chris Jones here,” Veach told his owner. “Can you enable us to close the gap?”

Keeping Jones required paying a higher premium.

“Do it,” Hunt responded.

The sides hashed out an extension (five years, $101 million guaranteed). “Credit to Clark,” Veach says.

To help clear money for Jones, Veach dealt cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Titans. Small price, considering. The GM addressed most other needs in the draft, adding speedy wideout Xavier Worthy and offensive tackle Kingsley Suamataia in the first two rounds. Veach sought cornerback depth from the fourth round onward. But the board never matched available talent with Kansas City’s prospect evaluations.

Oh, well. Even the NFL’s latest dynasty can’t have everything.

Plus, Veach already had Mahomes, who just turned 29 in September, but is already a two-time league MVP, three-time champion and three-time Super Bowl MVP. Veach had fallen for Mahomes when he was playing at Texas Tech; he had fallen especially hard for the uncommon physical gifts the quarterback possessed. Passes departing like rockets shot from launchpads. Spatial awareness that couldn’t be taught. Yards and touchdowns amassed as if playing real-life video games. Mahomes, at his essence, did things that defied physics, imagination, belief. Veach projected all and saw not what Mahomes was but what he could become—one of the best players in history.

The Chiefs traded up and drafted Mahomes with the 10th pick in 2017, then started creating an incubator designed for growth. Reid was the anchor of the infrastructure Kansas City put in place. He taught Mahomes offensive football. Quarterback Alex Smith provided early mentorship and a blueprint for approach. The training staff kept Mahomes healthy.

The box—his word—that insulates and protects Patrick Mahomes was beginning to take shape.

Mahomes’s natural bearing and intentional approach bled into the locker room. Full breaks from football ensured he could indulge his obsession with studying the game, meticulously gleaning insights from every season. The incubator produced intended growth. The national spotlight grew but somehow Kansas City, the actual city, limited its glare—it was the kind of place conducive to the normal-guy lifestyle Mahomes craved. His personal coaches enhanced individual skills. His football team enhanced how he deployed them.

Together, quarterback and franchise became the most adaptable team in football. Injuries could strike right before the playoffs (2022). Roster churn could threaten to unravel momentum (’23). The offense could sputter and stall (’24). Nothing mattered, beyond the baseline and what it fashioned: the NFL’s most dominant and most regenerative team.

Patrick Mahomes is not the first athlete to become paparazzi-level famous. Nor is he the first superstar to hire an army of support staff. The critical difference between Mahomes and many others is how deeply he listens to everyone handpicked for his orbit. He handles football prep and football. Every other thing, in season, is farmed out, which can make it seem like Mahomes is everywhere when, in reality, he’s mostly in the same place: One Arrowhead Drive.

“As I’ve gotten more fame,” he says, “I just stay within that box.”

Life in the box, as he defines it, consists of reporting to Chiefs headquarters before sunrise every morning; spending each day in recovery (body); practice (football); film (improving at football); and bonding with his “brothers” (same). Then, home to his wife, Brittany, his two children and a group of friends that includes some he met long ago in youth baseball. They watch sports. Hang with kiddos. Go to bed early. His circle rarely expands. If anything, it has constricted over time.

Mahomes says the inclination to climb inside that box, not come out, starts with faith and related understandings. Mahomes isn’t some Ryan Holiday book-carrying stoic. But his mindset is grounded in the core principles of stoicism espoused by ancient Greek philosophers. He decided, early on, to only address what he could directly impact, or even partially control. He let everything else go, and when he did, he says this mindset, “Made it to where I can play more free now. I’m not so worried. When I get to these big, big moments, I just focus on things I can control. And [others] will focus on how big the moment actually is.”

Mahomes can sound refreshing this way, a human embodiment of clichés most spew but rarely embody. Above his locker a collection of bobbleheads, baseball cards and family pics spruce up the top shelf. While most cubicle dwellers might elect for similar office decor, there’s a major difference. For Mahomes, half the bobbleheads are … him.

This box that Mahomes describes could sound more confining than comforting. Confining enough, perhaps, to make a real life outside football unattainable. Not so, he says. “It feels more comfortable. I [only] have relationships where [we] trust each other. I can be myself. I don’t have to try to be cool or whatever. I can be goofy. I can just be Patrick Mahomes, or who I believe …

“Patrick Mahomes is.”

After becoming the NFL’s first back-to-back champion in two decades earlier this year, Kansas City pointed its dynasty toward the league’s first Super Bowl three-peat. Veach never expected the chase would be easy. But this? Injury City? He never saw anything like it.

Before the opener, Veach loved the Chiefs’ reconfigured receivers room. He believed that Rashee Rice was poised to become a top wideout, after becoming a critical extension of Kansas City’s run game last season. “Rashee is gonna lead the NFL in receiving this year,” the GM became fond of saying.

Reid planned to control the middle of the field with Rice and tight end Travis Kelce. To add a needed vertical threat, Veach signed Marquise “Hollywood” Brown in March and then drafted Worthy, who is even faster.

By Sept. 29, Brown (injured on the first play of the first preseason game) and Rice (injured in Week 4) were gone. So was running back Isiah Pacheco. These weren’t typical injuries. Brown dislocated the sternoclavicular joint in his left shoulder and needed surgery. The Chiefs re-signed JuJu Smith-Schuster to replace him. Pacheco fractured his right fibula. And Rice, well, he had proven Veach correct. At least until Mahomes collided with Rice during a play in Los Angeles. The accidental pileup damaged the posterolateral corner of his right knee. Rice also needed surgery.

“The most statistically unlikely things that have ever happened,” Veach says. “I was sick to my stomach before Rashee got hurt. Has a No. 1 receiver ever been taken out for the season by his own quarterback? What are the odds of that happening?”

Smith-Schuster played his best game this season in a Week 5 win over New Orleans. Two weeks later he aggravated a hamstring injury in the first quarter against San Francisco and missed several games. Jaylen Watson, the Chiefs’ No. 2 cornerback, fractured his ankle that afternoon and suffered a high-ankle sprain, landing him on IR.

Veach spent weeks in full-on triage mode, with two assists from his quarterback. Mahomes popped out to voice support for two moves. One: bringing back Kareem Hunt, who was released by the team six years ago after video surfaced of him physically assaulting a woman. (He was never charged.)

The second move: adding Hopkins, a former All-Pro, to the decimated receiving corps. Veach acquired the veteran wideout from Tennessee before Week 8, for a conditional fifth-round pick. (It becomes a fourth-rounder if, among other requirements, the Chiefs reach the Super Bowl.) Hopkins picked up the offense instantly, with an assist from Mahomes, who helped with schematic nuances. Two days after arriving, Hopkins played 23 snaps against Las Vegas, taking part in yet another narrow win. Even then, tight end Jody Fortson landed on IR with a right knee injury.

Mahomes is … thanking God for evolution. For multiple evolutions, in fact. He traces his to one night—Jan. 20, 2019—the first of six-and-counting consecutive appearances in the AFC championship game. Kansas City lost, delaying his first Super Bowl appearance. The shocking part came afterward, when the opposing quarterback stopped by the home locker room. Tom Brady wanted to speak with him.

“You’re doing it the right way,” Brady said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Might not sound like much. Mahomes would be named league MVP that season. His 50 touchdown passes still mark a career high, as does his 8.8 yards per pass attempt. But neither of those quarterbacks see football like mere mortals. Statistics aren’t the point.

“For him to say that, a guy I watched growing up, winning so many Super Bowls, was huge for me; showed me I was doing the right things; gave me a stamp of approval,” Mahomes says.

The exchange led Mahomes to ask himself: How can I build on that?

Thus began the evolution that may, one day, put Brady and Mahomes side by side in debates over the single greatest player in NFL history. They don’t share much, varying in athletic traits, style of play, upbringing and how each handles the celebrity tsunami. But they do share two things: intense desire to be great and an intrinsic desire to evolve.

In 2018, Mahomes wanted to throw deep as often as possible. In each subsequent season, he sought more balance. Not on individual throws—he still threw plenty off his back foot, while scrambling, from varying angles, still turned in spectacular throws, mini-magic acts. But balance in knowing when to tap into his unique bag of physical tricks.

Reid helped, unspooling more knowledge as years passed. So did Jeff Christensen, Mahomes’s personal quarterback coach. Christensen refined mechanics and helped lead training sessions, alongside Mahomes and Kelce, in Texas each spring. Mindset shifts came next. The tricky part: playing safer, more efficiently, without in any way diminishing the gifts that separated him.

“I always look back at that first year. I don’t know how I did it, because I didn’t know,” Mahomes says. “There are times in my career where I was a beginner compared to now.”

In Mahomes’s bucket of elite traits—panoramic vision; memory, at least for football recall, that borders on savant or photographic; increased understanding of defenses and tendencies; high pain tolerance; golden arm—Christensen saw how the quarterback could vary his style of play each season. They worked on everything, no detail too small, no fundamental ever ignored. Throwing in the rain and snow. Moving in any weather. Studying elite QBs. Analyzing every interception.

Then came the high shells. Those f------ high-shell coverages, where defensive coordinators keep two safeties deep on almost every play. The point: limit deep passes. Limit, even, the desire to attempt them. Mahomes had to accept taking even fewer risks. They simply weren’t available and forced passes upticked his interception tally from six (2020) to 13 (’21) to 12 (’22) to a career-high 14 (’23). And Mahomes has 11 picks through 13 games this season.

Reid deploys a torturous exercise that has taken on additional emphasis in recent years. Broke it out nearly every day in training camp. Still does. The Long Drive Drill would save the Chiefs’ seasons.

“It sucks,” Mahomes says.

It’s less of a drill and more of a masochistic endurance assignment with football plays thrown in. Reid signals the first-team offense. Drives begin with two rules: no subs, no breaks. Mahomes runs play after play … after play … after play, up to 25 in a row, until every vet would trade a Super Bowl ring for a glass of water.

Mahomes and Reid have dominated the NFL since joining forces in 2017, when Mahomes was selected with the 10th pick in the draft. / Associated Press

Kansas City skyrocketed to the pinnacle of pro football with an intergalactic offense of deep passes and improbable throws. It stayed there by normalizing adaptation. Four Super Bowl appearances came from patience and change. It has continued this season. That high-flying offense is a distant memory: Mahomes is averaging a career-low 6.2 air yards per attempt this season while throwing deep (20-plus air yards) on just 6.3% of his attempts, also the lowest in his career.

Mahomes is rolling now, as if on one of those long-long-looonnnnngggg drives. “It’s about finding balance, finding flow, finding ways to win,” he says. “Obviously, I want big games—everybody does—but I’d rather [excel] in high-pressure moments. You saw that with Tom. He would go through his drills, his fundamentals; make the right plays; then, at the end, touchdown, win.”

These Chiefs are the new New England Patriots, in more ways than might seem obvious. When stuff happens—when Mahomes’s ankle rolls or he takes out his top receiver or defenses do everything possible to limit his explosiveness—he simply adapts. This helps everyone around him do the same. Fame, money, endless adoration and criticism and drama for all the mamas don’t mean anything to Mahomes.

He’s a pleasure, Reid notes. How many times has a head coach said that about a superstar? How many times did Bill Belichick say that about Tom Brady?

Reid says Mahomes is “conditioned” like Brady and also not like him at all. “Somewhere along the way, he programmed himself,” Reid adds. “To be a normal guy, a great person and … ” He trails off. The rest is obvious.

The statistics that do matter, that speak to both the Chiefs’ offensive evolution and their playoff chances: a 52% third-down conversion percentage, tops in the NFL through Week 14; and limited negative plays. They’re winning by what they don’t do, winning by limiting mistakes.

Sure, they needed to block a field goal to get past the middling Broncos to get to 9–0. Yes, in those 15 consecutive wins through Denver, the offense, once TNT-explosive, never scored more than 30 points in a game.

But Mahomes isn’t worried. Not even a little. Hopkins impacted victory No. 8, in only his second game with the team. His presence freed Kelce for the best two-game stretch of his season. Turnovers notwithstanding, Mahomes actually wants to take more calculated risks. “I need to get back to [that ’18 mentality] a little,” he says. “Find the right line.” Mahomes describes Hopkins’s understanding of scheme and manipulating defenses as “high-level stuff.”

If that doesn’t terrify the rest of the league, this from Worthy should. “We haven’t really clicked yet,” the rookie said after Week 9. “Once we do, it’s gonna be scary.”

Christensen, WHEN asked if Michael Jordan, not Brady, makes for a better comparison to Mahomes, can only sigh into his cell phone. As a longtime Bulls season-ticket holder, he promised to never make that comparison. Still, he can’t help it. “[Patrick] put himself in position” for that debate, Christensen says. “He’s closing fast, with no major flaw.”

“Obviously, that’s the hope,” Mahomes says. “To be someone like Jordan, who has an impact on the game.” Young Patrick devoured Bulls games his father taped on VHS.

“I want to be remembered for winning, obviously,” he says. “But I want to be remembered for how much fun it was to watch me play, and for the person I was on the field. I have that fire. I want people to enjoy the moment, every time.”

Veach draws another comparison: Mahomes as a Brady-John Elway hybrid. Mahomes possesses many of Elway’s immense physical gifts. Both share a background in baseball. “Elway attributes, Brady wiring,” Veach says.

This season, of victories that tasted better than they looked, chaos swirls like smoke signal warnings all around Mahomes. In that box, he doesn’t seem to notice. Because that’s him.

Patrick Mahomes just is.