It’s just too perfect. Patrick Mahomes, the US$450 million Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, who at 29 is already regarded as one of the greatest to ever throw a pig skin, is explaining the how and why.
Mahomes is wearing sweatpants and a hoody. And he’s giving hope to love-handled trackie dack enthusiasts everywhere as he espouses the athletic benefits of the “dad bod”.
“You have this amazing ability to improvise. You have such great technique when you’re throwing on the run, especially to the right,” Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback of all time, says to Mahomes in a sit-down interview for NFL on Fox.
“That’s stuff that I work on,” Mahomes responds.
“I use those hips and that oblique muscle to really rotate through there … The people who see the dad bod, that’s for a reason—that’s the obliques. I’m getting them right.”
Mahomes is listed at a red-hot $2.25 with the bookies to claim his fourth Super Bowl MVP on Monday morning (AEDT), and the reason his Chiefs are slight favourites to trump Philadelphia’s Eagles.
After delivering last year’s match-winning touchdown with three seconds on the clock, Mahomes broke the internet again when a shirtless photo of him celebrating went viral. A thoroughly unremarkable athletic aesthetic, revelling in the most remarkable of achievements.
By and large, punters and pundits revel in the athletic accomplishments of the unconventionally shaped. From baked-bean and cheese toastie enthusiast Shane Warne to rugby league Immortal Artie Beetson, who was so good he managed to fit two dad bods into one human frame.
Mahomes was presented with a pillow featuring his own shirtless visage at a press conference this week. He laughed and signed it.
The dad bod squad: A collection of sport’s most successful, not-so svelte athletes.Credit: Getty/SMH
More remarkable than the not-so-svelte shape of sporting greats from all generations, is that the seemingly unremarkable athletes like Mahomes and NBA superstars Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic thrive in 2025, when sport has never been more professional, monitored and measured.
Dad bod: a physique regarded as typical of an average father, especially one that is slightly overweight and not extremely muscular – The Merriam-Webster dictionary.
The “dad bod” definition, when viewed through a sporting lens, could often simply reflect the wisdom and experience of years spent honing a craft.
More compelling though is when athletic excellence comes in spite of the dad bod, or even better, because of it.
Shane Warne: fit for purpose.Credit: Tim Clayton
Warne often wrestled with his physique and public perception.
Infamously so when he explained that his 2003 use of a banned diuretic (which can mask steroids) stemmed from wanting to drop a few kilos ahead of a TV appearance.
But Australia’s greatest bowler also possessed physical attributes seemingly perfected for cricket’s most difficult craft.
“A meatball trapped between two sausages” was how Kerry O’Keefe described the late leg-spinner holding a ball once, and Warne often cited the power of his thick “sausage fingers” providing extra grip, power and revolutions when he spun leather.
Shane Warne circa 1991.Credit: Fairfax Media
His husky body made for strong shoulders, torso and rump that bore the toll of more than 50,000 deliveries at international level for more than 1000 Test and ODI wickets. The tale of how he came to it simply adds to Warne’s mystique.
“When I was at kindergarten someone jumped on my back and broke my legs,” Warne said at a 2006 book launch.
Warne ended up with both legs in casts, and the only way he could get around was on a trolley powered by his arms. “I was getting around on a trolley [using his arms to propel himself forward] for 12 months, lying down with broken legs. That might have something to do with why my wrists are good and have helped me bowl leg spin.”
Considering the emphasis on skin folds, fitness and standardised testing, you wonder if the mulleted, portly Warne of his formative years would be identified as a game-changing great in 2025.
Patrick Mahomes, not exactly an Adonis.Credit: Getty
Mahomes for example, has been tested extensively and by certain traditional measurements and is incredibly average. His 4.8-second 40-yard dash (36 metres) fits into the same speed bracket as defensive ends who outweigh him by up to 40 kilos.
Storm, Australia and Queensland Origin star Cameron Munster can identify.
“I haven’t got a fast twitch fibre in my body, I’m not very strong in the gym at all – I struggle to lift some of the weights. And I’ve definitely got a dad bod, but it serves me pretty well,” he says.
“It’s just a matter of knowing your strengths … People talk about professional athletes and wouldn’t pencil me into that. But I’d like to think [that among] professional footballers, I’m up there with who they’d think of.”
Storm star Cameron Munster.Credit: NRL Photos
The shared skills between Mahomes and Munster are a playmaker’s bread and butter – chopping and changing direction, spatial awareness, vision and reaction times.
Mahomes has never been tested at the P3 Peak Performance Project training lab in Santa Barbara, California.
But the tales from the institute’s testing of Denver Nuggets’ three-time MVP Jokic and Doncic – the central figure in the most stunning of NBA trades this week – are as instructive as they are famous.
Jokic reported for testing at P3 after he was drafted in 2014. His 17-inch (43 centimetres) vertical leap was – and still is – the smallest of more than 1000 NBA players tested at the facility.
Across a wider battery of tests including ability to decelerate and height from consecutive jumps, more instructive numbers emerged.
P3’s algorithm ended up placing Jokic among a group of players termed “Kinetic Movers”, or as sports scientist Marcus Elliott described them – “Swiss Army Knives”. Players with an answer to everything once they take the court.
“They’re just like a B-minus to B-level [above average] in everything,” Elliott told The New York Times.
“And that’s Jokic. He may look herky-jerky to you. But looking at the data, we think it looks really beautiful.”
Nikola Jokic in action for Serbia at the Olympics last year.Credit: AP
Doncic’s athleticism, or lack thereof in a conventional sense, has been put front and centre of his trade from Dallas to the Lakers this week.
The US$43 million guard per year addressed the Mavericks’ concerns around his fitness and conditioning that reportedly played a part in him being jettisoned, saying “It’s a motive – I know it’s not true – but it’s a motive.”
Before the rumour and innuendo of a showstopping player trade, Doncic’s P3 testing as a teenager again illustrated there can be more than meets the eye in athletic stakes.
As noted first by The Wall Street Journal, the 2019 rookie of the year tested off the charts in the “eccentric force” metric – measuring how fast Doncic could slow down.
Before the age of 18, Doncic was not all that far behind fellow future Hall of Fame member James Harden’s test results in the same metric, belying deficiencies in other movements.
Luka Doncic, now formerly of the Dallas Mavericks.Credit: Getty Images
Like any athlete, whether they’re arriving with a six-pack or keg, appropriate fitness will always be required. The dad bods invite more scrutiny.
In the case of Australian golfing favourite Craig Parry, reporters regularly trotted out brutal assessments of his physique.
“He can’t walk past one biscuit without talking three” and “his girth is closing the gap on his height” were lines no doubt encouraged by Parry’s strong relationships with the press, self-deprecating nature and definitive dad bod.
Which also turned out to have Samson-esque qualities when it came to his game.
“I got fit, believe it or not, a few times in my career,” Parry told SEN Radio a few years ago.
“I lost a lot of the feeling in my hands [for his shots] so my chipping was very poor, the distance control on iron shots was very poor as well.
Craig Parry lost his game when he lost weight.Credit: AP
“In the end I ended up going back to not worrying about what’s happening in the gym, I just went back to practising. So rather than being in the gym for another hour, I’d go and practice my short game.”
For the purposes of this story, Munster is threatening to kill the golden goose.
His 10th season in the NRL was the most frustrating of his career and culminated in post-season operations on both hips. He’s dropped four kilos over the off-season after enlisting advice from Anthony Minichiello, who hasn’t met a carb he despised in the past 15 years.
“I’m trying to lose the dad bod,” Munster confesses.
“I think I could have got away with it for a full career if it wasn’t for the six-agains [rule change].
“The game’s a lot faster with these new rules, so I’ve got to be a bit lighter, faster and more nimble on my feet.
“My strength has always come from my hamstrings and glute muscles, and my fend too. As I’m getting older I need to look after them a bit better.
“You see guys like Jason Saab and Xavier Coates, they’re such incredible athletes.
“But rugby league still got a lot of footy players too. And we can’t lose them either.”
Or, sausage fingers crossed, the dad bods.
