Patrick Mahomes Is Going to Be Treated Like LeBron — You May as Well Enjoy It
Patrick Mahomes is already being forced to play by a different set of rules. When the Kansas City Chiefs lost Super Bowl LV to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Narrative Machine began whirring into action for some of the world's speediest sports media talking heads, hot-take artists, and under-informed social media savants. The results were predictable.
Did Mahomes throw his teammates under the bus? (No.) Was Mahomes actually to blame for the offensive line's most disastrous snaps? (Did you watch the game?) Is this a sign of Mahomes' impending regression? (Wait, what? No. Are you kidding? No.)
As a part of an effort to not give extra oxygen to some of the sports world's worst takes, I won't be citing my sources from that list, but if you rummage through Twitter for long enough, you'll find that these are all real things that real people have said this week. I'll suggest you spare yourself the search and take my word for it.
The Super Bowl loss was shocking and horrible for the Chiefs, but it wasn't all that difficult to comprehend after the fact. The Chiefs got handled on both lines of scrimmage, the Chiefs' pass-catchers had their worst game of the Mahomes era, the Buccaneers dictated the game on both sides of the ball, and Mahomes was essentially — to quote my friend Seth Keysor of The Chief in the North Newsletter — Captain America fighting Thanos' army if the rest of The Avengers never showed up. It was a bloodbath that even a superhero couldn't single-handedly stop.
But you probably wouldn't know that if you skipped the game and instead opted for Skip.
Even if you're not an NBA fan or if you're strictly a passive observer to the never-ending "LeBron James or Michael Jordan?" debates that exist solely to fill airtime in the dead of Sports Talk Winter, you probably know how those conversations go.
Is LeBron the greatest ever? No, he can't be, Jordan has more rings. Or maybe he can be, because he's more dominant in more aspects of the game. Or he can't be, because Jordan went undefeated in the Finals. Or he can be, because LeBron has been to 10 Finals already. Or he can't be, because...
But have you noticed what happens while people argue about LeBron vs. ghosts of basketball past who he'll never get to face off against? LeBron has been an absolutely relentless force in the NBA for nearly two decades. From the age of 19 through his current age-36 season, he's been unstoppable. But he's only won four NBA MVPs. Four. And all four came in a five-year stretch between 2009 and 2013.
Across sports, we get greatness fatigue. It pays to find a reason that Josh Allen should get more MVP votes than Mahomes or that James Harden or Russell Westbrook should get the award over LeBron. You'll get more run on Twitter if you can find a reason that Mahomes isn't already the greatest player in the NFL or why LeBron has lost his spot atop the mountain. Find the next hot thing and say that you'd rather have Lamar Jackson over Mahomes or Zion Williamson over LeBron. You'll be wrong, but you'll be unique.
This is going to be a learning process for Chiefs Kingdom, and a totally reasonable one. We've never known what it's like to root for the greatest player in the NFL and the front-running team looking to stack championships over the next decade. It's unfamiliar territory, but that's part of the fun.
You don't have to give your retweets to the worst thing you see on Twitter on a given day. You don't have to watch sports talk shows that have more incentive to have a controversial take than to give the right analysis. More than anything else, you don't have to let these borderline-fictional made-for-engagement arguments distract you from the fact that you're watching one of the greatest things in all of sports.
For more Chiefs news and analysis, follow @jbbrisco on Twitter. For more on this topic, listen to Friday's episode of the Roughing the Kicker Chiefs Podcast.
Read More: Patrick Mahomes on the Chiefs' Mood After Losing Super Bowl LV: 'We're Going to Be Back'
