Patrick Mahomes and His Big Dumb Cartoon Money
Today's column was going to be about a completely different thing, but then the Kansas City Chiefs decided they’re going to (potentially) pay Patrick Mahomes over HALF A BILLION DOLLARS, so now it has to be about that.
Mahomes will be a Chief until at least 2031. I’ll be 39. Everyone is doing the “this is how old I’ll be when Mahomes’ new contract is over” thing and I just wanted to fit in.
Ten seasons is a long time. Ten seasons ago, we were trying to convince ourselves that Matt Cassel would take the next step in 2011 and the playoff misery would soon be over.
The next ten seasons will probably feel like they’re going by a lot quicker as long as that vaccine gets figured out.
If the world doesn’t remain in stasis or consume itself, the next decade should be, at a bare minimum, fun for Chiefs fans. The worst-case-scenario of being a Chiefs fan right now is fun. How wild is that?
The Chiefs have never been this team. They’ve never been the team with the guy with the contract. Kansas City has never been the center of the NFL universe. But they are now, and by default, that makes the Chiefs the center of the American sports universe. Or, at least one of the centers. You can’t really have a single center of something as amorphous and constantly changing as “all of the sports.” But you get the point.
Every nationally-televised game featuring the Chiefs will be a marquee money matchup for the next 12 seasons. The Chiefs are going to be on national TV so often it’ll make Sunday Ticket an embarrassing expenditure for me on a per-game basis. “Uh, yeah, I reuse my paper towels and last night I ate a handful of Cheez-It Grooves for dinner, but I can watch my football team in full 1080p HD the six times a year they’re playing garbage teams and the game isn’t on everywhere. That guy throwing the ball there makes eleventy quadrillion dollars an hour. Would you like to sit on my indoor lawn chair and watch?”
It’s only been, as of me right now typing this in bed, lying on my tummy with my legs kicked up, a day and a half since Mahomes signed his record contract, and of course, it has already been dissected at every angle. Was this a better deal for the Chiefs or Mahomes? Is its structure too team-friendly? Why would a player sign a 10-year extension when he could make more signing a five-year extension followed by another five-year extension?
It’s HALF A BILLION DOLLARS. Who cares? This is cartoon money. This is monocle, twirly mustache, top hat and cane money. This is never be able to stare blankly ahead in the car and tell your kids “I don’t have McDonald’s money” money. If it wasn’t sports and it wasn’t Mahomes, it’d be an evil amount of money.
Everyone won here. Mahomes gets HALF A BILLION DOLLARS and the Chiefs get to keep the most talented player in the league’s history on their team for the next dozen years. I don’t think 92-year-old Pat Mahomes is going to be losing sleep in his zero-gravity future-bed over the structure of his giant contract that gave him infinite money. I don’t think Clark Hunt and the Hunt family looks at money any differently than you or I look at a fresh, full roll of paper towels after a minor spill.
But also, someone is getting paid a HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to play a sport, so everyone kind of lost, too. Yeah, it’s exciting and cool. But also it’s a little gross. Just, like, objectively. It’s not, ya know, Bezos gross or anything. But that amount of money being used this way will always feel like one of those things the aliens will find records of after we’re gone and use to teach the alien kids at the alien school about how dumb the Earth people were. “Soon, the Earthlings would replace their water with Bang Energy and everyone would die, but the trees got super pumped from all the creatine.”
Trying to parse who got the best end of a deal when someone is getting HALF A BILLION DOLLARS is so perfectly American it hurts. That’s an amount of money so huge most people cannot even fully comprehend its vastness. That’s why we can debate it like Mahomes got a $2 raise when he could’ve got $2 and a better parking spot. It’s an amount of money so big we stop hearing it after “503.”
I honestly do not care about the mechanisms, guaranteed or otherwise, involved in how Patrick Mahomes makes money. He lives in a different universe than me. The structure of the system he works in values his production at HALF A BILLION DOLLARS over the next 12 years. The structure of the system I work in values my production at $12 an hour. The structure of this system I write in values my production in exposure. On my walk to work this morning, I passed five homeless people.
So I’m just going to enjoy watching Mahomes whenever I get to see him play again. I’m going to eat my Cheez-It Grooves and watch him play and have fun. Thinking too much about what the money involved in the entire enterprise reflects back at me will only make it kind of sad.
