After 2024 Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes Is the Mountain the Rest of the NFL Has to Scale
In 13 days, I’ll be on the ground in Indianapolis. Viva Las … 2024 season …
• As I was walking through the expansive area the Kansas City Chiefs had cordoned off in the Resorts World complex Sunday night, past trays of pasta and sliders, a couple of sports bards, and into the club area where the players and coaches were, I bumped into Ryan Petkoff, a senior vice president for Kansas City owner Clark Hunt, and someone I’ve known a while. He was smiling ear-to-ear, and he wasn’t going to waste words getting to his point.
“He’s Michael Jordan,” Petkoff said.
After Sunday night, it’s not an absurd comparison.
Mahomes has led the Chiefs to a dynasty in just six seasons as the starter.
Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated
Patrick Mahomes has three titles at 28. Tom Brady was 27 when he won his third, but he didn’t win another until he was 37. Jordan won his third NBA title at 30 years old, and another when he was 33. Wayne Gretzky had four at 27 years old but was traded that summer and never won another. From there, we can get into MVP awards: Mahomes has as many as Jordan had at 28 (2), one more than Brady, and actually seven (!) fewer than Gretzky. But the deeper you dig, the more the overarching point is reinforced.
Mahomes is so good, so young that he’s already in an argument crossing over sports.
That, by the way, doesn’t mean that Joe Burrow (who I believe is the top contender to Mahomes’s throne, among his contemporaries), Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Trevor Lawrence or C.J Stroud couldn’t eventually challenge Mahomes’s place as king of this era of quarterbacking. What I am saying is that Mahomes is now at the same place Brady and Jordan and Gretzky were in their sports—where a single athlete becomes the very mountain the rest have to scale to win a single championship.
And if you want to know what that can do to teams, just take a look at the AFC East of the Brady era, and how the Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins and New York Jets became completely destabilized, firing coaches and banishing quarterbacks over and over, in large part because simply winning the division was so unrealistic for so many different iterations of those teams.
The monster that was Brady’s New England Patriots affected the legacies of peers like Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers, who might’ve won more titles in another era, the same way Jordan’s Chicago Bulls suppressed Patrick Ewing’s New York Knicks and Karl Malone’s Utah Jazz and Gary Payton’s Sonics (do they stay in Seattle if they win a title in that era?). And just as Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers swallowed a five-year period in the NHL whole.
Mahomes’s Chiefs are, effectively, already doing the same, blocking the access his peers have to the stage he climbed for the third time after Super Bowl LVIII.
And if you’re doing that, the truth is you’re about as good as it gets.
• The more I think about how the San Francisco 49ers played, the more I believe that Kyle Shanahan’s crew simply got (to borrow my buddy Mike Silver’s term) “Mahomesed.”
Coming into the game, San Francisco felt like it would need, given Kansas City’s talent in the secondary, a really solid game from Jauan Jennings. He would be drawing the most favorable matchups, especially when the Chiefs started to play more man in the second half. And the Niners certainly got that. On the other side of the ball, it was no secret that San Francisco would need its best game from an uber-talented offensive line that’s been up and down this year, and it sure did get that too.
Brock Purdy played well enough to win, and well enough to force the defense to play more man as the game went on (because he was hitting the seams and holes in the Chiefs’ zone looks so efficiently). To me, it was comparable—if stylistically different—to the way Jalen Hurts played against Kansas City in last year’s Super Bowl. It was, simply, good enough.
So, really, the Niners got what they needed, but in the end, it was Kansas City’s ability to make those final plays in OT: from Chris Jones pressuring Purdy on third down to force a field goal and Travis Kelce’s massive 22-yard catch at the end, to Mahomes converting third- and fourth-and-1s with his legs before driving the final stake through San Francisco.
Of course, we always have to assign blame in these games. I just think, in this situation, we all have the opportunity not to do that. In this case we can say: That was a damn good game, played by two damn good teams. The one with the transcendent quarterback, plus a pair of future Hall of Famers in their 30s, had a little more in the end.
• Just to circle back on the story we told Monday morning on Kelce’s Saturday night speech to his teammates—I did get the chance to run it by Andy Reid, and the Chiefs coach's response was succinct and to the point.
“Trav is the heartbeat of this team,” Reid texted Tuesday morning.
It really is an amazing story of growth, if you know it—and it goes all the way back to when he was suspended for a year from the University of Cincinnati football team, moved in with his brother, converted to tight end and then slipped in the draft. A part of Reid’s first draft class in Kansas City, Kelce’s place as a leader was vital this season, particularly given the bumps the Chiefs had to ride out. And that’s in large part because of how his teammates see him as a person: “He’s a special human being,” second-year defensive end George Karlaftis said.
Kelce helped the Chiefs rally in the fourth quarter to send Super Bowl LVIII to overtime.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
Kelce’s also still a pretty good tight end. Presuming he plays next season—and he said afterward that he plans to—Kelce should pass Antonio Gates for third all time in yards (he’s 513 behind right now) and catches (48 behind) among tight ends, with Tony Gonzalez and Jason Witten (who each had 17-year careers; Kelce’s only played 11 seasons) a little further off.
• There won’t the postgame exodus of coaches that we had from last year’s Super Bowl (Shane Steichen, Jonathan Gannon and Eric Bieniemy were the big departing names then), but there is one coach on his way out, and that’s 49ers pass-game coordinator Klint Kubiak.
Kubiak will soon be named offensive coordinator for the New Orleans Saints, pushing a deal over the goal line that’s been in the works for almost two weeks.
The interesting thing about the hire is that Kubiak is still very young, at 36, but will bring significant play-calling experience to the job. He bounced around college and pro football, coaching for a decade before getting his break in 2019, when he was hired to be the Minnesota Vikings quarterbacks coach under first-year coordinator Kevin Stefanski. Kubiak coached in that role again under his dad, Gary, in ’20 before taking the reins in ’21.
Since then, messy timing has bitten Kubiak. He ascended into a play-calling spot in Minnesota just as Mike Zimmer’s relationship with Vikings ownership was fraying, which led to Zimmer’s staff, Kubiak included, being ousted in early 2022. He then joined Nathaniel Hackett with the Denver Broncos, and that, obviously, went the way it went, which led to Shanahan bringing him in to replace Bobby Slowik as pass-game coordinator last year.
The silver lining, of course, would be the year and education he just got in getting to work for Shanahan, nearly two decades after their dads worked together in Denver.
“Just being here a year, my experience is, Kyle really lets you into his brain in his game plan meetings,” Kubiak told me. “He’s thinking out loud in what he’s looking for and what he wants to attack, the players he wants to attack certain coverages with. He’s such a bright coach. Just to be around him, you soak in things that are important to him and things he uses to make decisions. I would say he’s very forthcoming with his assistants, and he also is very challenging with us. He demands a lot out of us and gets the most out of us.”
And that pressure pushed Kubiak to improve.
“There’s pressure, but what I’ve found is it’s good pressure,” Kubiak says. “You better have a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C, and you better know why you’re bringing up what you’re bringing up. It’s all for the right reasons. It’s all for the quarterback to get the most successful play you can give him with the most answers. It’s been a really eye-opening experience, a really positive experience. I’m just lucky to be a part of it.”
So in that way, the Saints should get the very best of Kubiak. Both in that he’s already been through it as a play-caller, and in that he’s had a shot to reset and grow since then.
• Two pipeline names that will be important now for the 49ers: RJ Gillen and Tariq Ahmad. The former runs pro scouting and the latter college scouting for the team, and each should be in line for a promotion. Over the last four years, the Niners have lost their top four personnel men under GM John Lynch: Martin Mayhew went to the Washington Commanders in 2021; Ethan Waugh went to the Jacksonville Jaguars in ’22; Ran Carthon went to the Tennessee Titans in ’23; and, just last month, Lynch’s No. 2, Adam Peters, was hired as Washington’s GM.
No one has been better at developing and harvesting front-office talent than the Niners, and that’ll certainly be put to the test this offseason. It also might make sense to hire someone with some experience to supplement—former Raiders GM Dave Ziegler, who worked with Peters for four years in Denver, and crossed paths with Lynch when he sat in with the Broncos, is one name that might make some sense as an add to the personnel department.
• The idea of keeping Justin Fields in Chicago, even if the Bears drafted a quarterback with the first pick (which ESPN’s Adam Schefter suggested Sunday), is an intriguing idea that the team has discussed. It’s doable, too, because Fields is only due $3.2 million in cash for 2024, a number that’s manageable even for a backup at the position, relative to the market.
Fields has been a topic of debate after the Bears secured their second consecutive No. 1 pick.
David Reginek/USA TODAY Sports
That said, most teams try to avoid any sort of awkwardness in the quarterback room if they’re drafting a young one. And while Fields is a really good person, it would naturally be weird for a No. 1 pick to have a player the team traded up to take at 11th sitting next to him. So my guess would be, again, Fields gets traded.
(Also, it behooves the Bears to have potential suitors for Fields think they’d actually consider keeping him.)
• Make no mistake about this: Mike Zimmer was always the guy for the Dallas Cowboys. As we wrote a few weeks ago, the Jones family loves the former Vikings coach. He’s top 10 among the people they’ve had there over the years, and the chance to have Zimmer replace Dan Quinn was the ideal from the minute Quinn took the Washington job.
Zimmer also remains among the NFL’s most cunning defensive minds. And sure, he’s 67 years old. But Steve Spagnuolo is 64, and it looks like he’s doing a pretty good job.
• Bruce Arians telling the Tampa Bay Times’s Rick Stroud that he loves Michael Penix Jr., was, well, perfect. Here’s what he said: “As far as the football grade, I love [Penix] because he does things I love to do. He puts [the ball] up the field. He’s as accurate on throws up the field as anyone I’ve seen in 15 years. Just to fight through that last game after he had that ankle tore up. But what he did to Texas was unbelievable.”
Indeed, Penix is an Arians quarterback. In fact, I had scouts compare him to a three-point shooter, stylistically. But what Michigan did to Penix in the title game—forcing him to accurately throw underneath—really brought to life where scouts see his flaws. So to take the analogy to another level, he’ll have to find a way to show his mid-range game over the next couple months.
• Mitch Trubisky going back to Buffalo would make all the sense in the world. He had a really nice year there in 2021, to the point where Brian Daboll seriously considered taking the quarterback to the New York Giants with him. And while the Bills were happy to have Josh Allen’s buddy Kyle Allen there last year, Trubisky would help to upgrade the room.
• We’ll dive into this more next Monday, but I’d bet the Bears, Commanders and Patriots will have a pretty good market for the first three picks, if they’re willing to move.
