Patrick Mahomes!
So many points, so little time.
Yes, yes, yes, we could carry on about the stats that go with the quarterback’s second Super Bowl win in the past four years, as he guided the Kansas City Chiefs to a 38-35 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday (AEDT).
We could go on and on about it in the way football analysts are so often wont to do.
You know the stuff: “Mahomes was 21-of-27 in passing for a 77.8 per cent completion rate, throwing for 182 yards and three touchdowns, with an average of 6.6 yards per play compared to 5.9 yards for the Eagles.”
But honestly, who truly cares for such numbers? It’s like taking a Shakespeare sonnet and breaking it down to iambic or dactylic pentameters, whatever those boogers are. It’s taking a thing of beauty and so working it over with the slide rule and magnifying glass, with the scalpel and tweezers, that all that’s left is a bloody mess.
Patrick Mahomes celebrates victory at the Super Bowl in Arizona.Credit:Getty Images
You and me, babe, we are the romantics, maybe the last of the breed, the ones who care little for yardages and percentages, for breakdowns and bloody statistics. That is not what we are in sport for. It doesn’t do it for us, and never has.
What does it for us, is the glory of the story, the thing that Mahomes brought to the arena that simply can’t be broken down and analysed, can’t be minutely dissected. We’re in it for the precious thing that is only truly known to those who were there at the time. The rest of us just get glimpses – but even that’s enough to make us lean into it.
I refer, of course, to the situation just before half-time.
The Chiefs are looking ordinary as the Eagles start to run rampant. Philadelphia lead 21-14 and are rising hard, while the men of Kansas City are visibly wilting. And look at Mahomes now, as the Eagles – including our own Jordan Mailata – close in on him in the pocket. Mahomes twists, turns, escapes and runs like a scalded possum, only to be caught by Eagles linebacker T.J. Edwards, who not only tackles him but hits him hard on an already weak ankle.
Patrick Mahomes was forced off the field in the first half due to an ankle injury.Credit:AP
Mahomes looks incapable of getting up on his own. Finally on his feet, he limps, painfully to the sideline, even as the Chiefs’ No.2 quarterback gets the tap. You’re going to be on.
As half-time mercifully comes, the obvious thing is for Mahomes to be worked on by physios with heavy strapping, and strapping doctors with painkilling needles, but the quarterback knows his team is now 10 points down and there is something more important he has to do. This is the part I love.
“Why the [f—] is it so quiet in here?” Mahomes starts, in the dressing room, according to The Kansas City Star. “Ya’ll gotta get some [f—ing] energy in here!”
These prove to be his opening remarks.
He goes on to implore the team to play with the same spirit that made them love the game in the first place. We know few of the exact words used. We do know he was passionate, fiery and direct.
All of us, ALL OF US, have to play with energy! With joy!
Back in the day, when Mahomes still had detractors, the sneer would be that the black quarterback wouldn’t truly make it in the NFL as, while the other quarterbacks played a mixture of high art and science, all Mahomes played was, and I quote, “street ball” (sniff).
After all, so many of his plays are made up as he goes along, far beyond the purview of the coaches, so spontaneous that not even he knows what he will do next. But Mahomes, for all his staggering skills, has never resiled from this style. He’s not only never apologised for eschewing the scientific, but always emphasised the virtues of playing the game the way it was meant to be played. With joy!
Whatever he exactly said, and however he said it, the point was that, as the son of a former Major League Baseball player with an 12-year career – who, as his coach says “grew up in a locker room” – he was speaking the language of the team. Mahomes knew what the vibe of a team heading to victory felt like, because he had been around winning and losing teams since the day dot, and what we have put out there in the first half is not that!
“We just challenged each other,” Mahomes said afterwards, quoted in the New York Times, “to leave everything out there, and I don’t want to say we played tight in the first half, but you didn’t see that same joy that we play with. And I wanted guys to just know that everything we worked for is for this moment.”
Chiefs coach Andy Reid has the brains to stay out of it, designing plays that take full advantage of his QB’s transcendental skills and knowing that – on such occasions – it is for him to be a rock while Mahomes rolls.
“When it’s time for the guys around him to raise their game, he helps them with that,” Reid says. “The great quarterbacks make everybody around him better, including the head coach, so he’s done a heck of a job.”
Patrick Mahomes with Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid.Credit:Getty Images
Indeed.
For the speech works.
The game put on by the Chiefs for the second half was unrecognisable from the first half. Suddenly they were energetic, joyous, confident, overwhelming!
Did someone say Shakespeare?
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.”
And yes, we have to go back into the stats to capture it, but just quickly.
For that second half, Mahomes throws 13 of 14 passes to their targets and leads the team on three touchdown drives. Around and about him, the whole team picks up what he has put down, and the rewards are theirs. They win.
Beyond Mahomes’ skills, it is the character, the chemistry, and the spirit he brings to the team that makes the difference. And it doesn’t stop when the final siren blows and they are Super Bowl victors.
“Immediately after returning to the locker room after the victory,” the New York Times reports, “Mahomes, still in his pads, spent nearly 10 minutes shaking hands and hugging every single teammate and coach.”
Gold, my friends. Gold!
