At the time, Patrick Mahomes didn’t know what would become of the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.
Seven years into his career, and going into Year 8, the Chiefs’ quarterback had been around long enough to know that plenty can happen between the dog days of training camp and February. But, the three-time champion also knew there was a way to give himself the best chance to return to the big game, and it went back to the advice Tom Brady gave in a quiet corner of Arrowhead Stadium in January 2019.
Brady told Mahomes, “to just keep doing what I’m doing.” And, Mahomes told me, he still considers it the best advice he’s ever gotten as a pro.
Six months later, it’s gotten him and his teammates back to February—again.
It’s the fifth time in six years that the Chiefs have extended their season past January and into the Super Bowl, which has never been done. In 13 days, they’ll have a shot at becoming the first team to win three consecutive Lombardi Trophies—something Terry Bradshaw’s Pittsburgh Steelers, Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers and Brady’s New England Patriots all failed to do after winning back-to-back titles. And the reality is, this Chiefs season has embodied the advice given to Mahomes from No. 12.
The plan back in August looked so clear. Mahomes didn’t know then that Hollywood Brown wouldn’t make his Chiefs debut until Christmas. He didn’t know that not one (Kingsley Suamataia), but two (Wanya Morris) promising young left tackles would need to be sat down, and a veteran would be signed at midseason (D.J. Humphries), only to have a guard (Joe Thuney) end up being the answer at the position. He didn’t know the corner situation would look untenable in December, or that Chris Jones would play through an injury, too.
But what Mahomes did know was that there’d be a way, even if it wasn’t the plan he and Andy Reid, and guys such as Jones, Travis Kelce, Matt Nagy and Steve Spagnuolo had mapped out for the Chiefs back in the summer. And here they are, again.
“We dealt with so much adversity at the beginning of the year, and we just kept winning,” Mahomes told me in a quiet moment after Kansas City’s AFC championship win over the Buffalo Bills. “We found ways to win at the end of the day. Games like today—and the defense getting that stop, when we only got a field goal at the end, that’s just stuff we did from the beginning of the year. It’s made us hardened. It’s made us even better for the adversity we dealt with. I’m just glad we got some of those guys that were injured back, and now we can see the vision [we had] for the offense.
“We’re going to need it because we’re going up against a great team in Philadelphia.”
Indeed, they are. And that path Mahomes laid out is why it’ll be so hard for the Eagles to beat the Chiefs in two weeks—just like it’s proven borderline impossible for every other team this year.
