How Patrick Mahomes’s Injury Influences the Chiefs’ Future Plans

The star quarterback’s absence may force Kansas City to take a broader view of its roster. Plus, the Packers could be equipped to succeed without Micah Parsons.

Patrick Mahomes had surgery on Monday to repair his torn ACL. / Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images

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1. Kansas City Chiefs  
2. Green Bay Packers 
3. Pittsburgh Steelers 
4. Los Angeles Chargers 
5. Denver Broncos
6. NFL schedule
7. NFL draft
8. Philip Rivers
9. Mike McDaniel
10. Washington Commanders

 Tuesday’s here, and things are starting to heat up with only three weeks left in the season. Our notes …

Kansas City Chiefs  

Let’s start here: The NFL is worse for Patrick Mahomes being out.

It sucks seeing anyone injured, but this is the league’s most decorated and most prominent player, and a really good guy and teammate to boot. The playoffs will feel different without him, and that’s a testament to how good he’s been over the past eight seasons.

As for what this means moving forward, Mahomes had surgery to repair his torn left ACL and LCL on Monday. The fact that he’s dealing with a multi-ligament injury complicates his return timetable. While Mahomes being ready for Week 1 in 2026 hasn’t been ruled out, it’s also no sure thing. His rehab from Monday’s surgery could linger into the 2026 regular season.

The good news for the Chiefs is that Mahomes is Mahomes. So just as they knew the injury was bad when he didn’t pop to his feet, they’re certain he’ll do everything he can to be back on the field as soon as humanly possible.

That said, this does create an interesting fork in the road for the Chiefs’ franchise. If there’s no assurance that Mahomes will be back for the start of 2026, or that he’ll be a full version of himself next year (a lot of players aren’t quite themselves the first season back from a knee reconstruction), then that could force Kansas City to take a broader view of how it’s building around Mahomes—considering ’27 and beyond.

In 2027, Trey Smith and Creed Humphrey will be 28, Trent McDuffie, Nick Bolton and Rashee Rice will be 27, George Karlaftis will be 26, and Josh Simmons and Xavier Worthy will be 24. Four of those guys are already on second contracts, a fifth (McDuffie) will likely be soon, and the other three are still on rookie deals. So some combination of those guys, if not all of them, is the core group around Mahomes going forward.

The question, from there, is how you’ll supplement that group, preparing for a post-Travis Kelce and Chris Jones world—and the second iteration of the Mahomes–Andy Reid dynasty.

The first thing the Chiefs can do is the simplest, and that’s for GM Brett Veach to nail his draft picks. If you look back, you see that Tom Brady’s torn ACL happened at roughly the same stage of his career as Mahomes’s injury. The Patriots had another year of hanging on to an old core in Brady’s first year back (2009), then got a lot younger. Between ’09 and ’12, they drafted Sebastian Vollmer, Julian Edelman, Devin McCourty, Rob Gronkowski, Aaron Hernandez, Nate Solder, Dont’a Hightower and Chandler Jones, and the rest is history.

I have no doubt—knowing what I know about the three-time Super Bowl MVP—that Mahomes will come back with a vengeance, whenever he’s ready to return. But Mahomes’s ability to get back to the stages he’s been on won’t just be up to him. Brady himself would tell you that there’s another part to the second act of his story. And the Chiefs now have a chance to jumpstart helping Mahomes write a second of his own.

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Green Bay Packers 

While lacking the implications that Mahomes’s injury will have on the Chiefs, the Packers’ loss of Micah Parsons has been a tough one for the Packers to endure.

Parsons has been everything Green Bay hoped for, both on and off the field. He had 12.5 sacks, 26 quarterback hits and two forced fumbles when he went down in his 14th game of the season. And that doesn’t even begin to illustrate the impact he had on every offense that the Packers faced. DC Jeff Hafley moved him around the front, empowering Parsons to become a real force against the run (contrary to his prior reputation) in the scheme.

So, how do the Packers replace him? The absence of Devonte Wyatt, the tepid return of Lukas Van Ness (he tried coming back Sunday for a second time, but only played 22 snaps) and safety Evan Williams going down in Denver complicates the question.

But there is a simple answer, and that’s to go back to what they did in 2024, when they finished in the top five of most defensive categories without Parsons. Then, they played out of more odd spacing up front to stop the run, with the since-departed Kenny Clark and Tedarrell Slaton at defensive tackle, and had to be more creative with simulated pressures to get to the quarterback. (A lot of calls this year have been to create one-on-one situations for Parsons.)

Obviously, it’s good news that Hafley has that built into the scheme. With so many players held over from last year, it won’t be foreign for most to have more exotic rush plans dialed or, say, linebacker Edgerrin Cooper more involved in that plan.

As for the off-field piece, it’s a blow for the Packers, too, who’d gotten a different version of Parsons than the one everyone had heard about. He had weekly one-on-one meetings with Hafley to go over the plan, and took real ownership in how the defense was playing around him—something that will only grow when Parsons gets back.

And of course, that it won’t happen this year isn’t great news.

We’ll see to what degree the Packers can survive without him starting Saturday night in Chicago.

Aaron Rodgers led the Steelers to a 28–15 win over the Dolphins. / Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

Pittsburgh Steelers 

Aaron Rodgers, to me, looked as comfortable as he has all season, and maybe as he has in a couple of years, on Monday night, even in pretty frigid conditions (I know how my tolerance for the cold has diminished in my 40s, so respect to Aaron for that).

He finished 23-of-27 for 224 yards, with two scores and a 125.9 passer rating, connecting with eight different receivers, with five of them catching at least three balls.

And there are reasons for it. One is time on task. Another is the veteran group around him and how it’s evolved. Over the years, quarterbacks like Rodgers (Brady and Peyton Manning come to mind) have preferred more experienced skill players around them, because those guys allow the offense’s triggerman to play chess. The premise being, of course, the smarter the player, the more movable he is in the scheme.

Kenneth Gainwell (fifth season) had seven catches on Monday, DK Metcalf (seventh season), Pat Freiermuth (fifth season), Darnell Washington (third season) and Jaylen Warren (fourth season) had three catches, Jonnu Smith (ninth season) had two catches, and Marquez Valdes-Scantling (eighth season), and Adam Thielen (13th season) had a catch apiece.

The flip side with an older group is the variable of health and endurance. But if these guys can stay upright for the Steelers, and the defense can play as fast as it did Monday night, and get T.J. Watt back? Maybe Pittsburgh has a run left in it after all.

Los Angeles Chargers 

I was the first person to stand up and say it was going to be tough for the Chargers to maintain their identity as a Jim Harbaugh team after tackle Joe Alt was lost for the season in Week 9, which followed the summertime loss of his bookend, Rashawn Slater.

That they’ve pulled it off is a massive tribute to Harbaugh and that staff.

Over the past five games, since losing Alt, the Chargers are 4–1, averaging 122.4 yards rushing and 31.4 rush attempts per game. And while there has been a hit to their yards per carry—3.9 for those five games—the consistency of formula (they only strayed in the one loss in which they had 16 rush attempts) is appreciated by the guys it’s been formed for.

“We lost two great individuals, but it’s about the collective now,” Chargers linebacker Daiyan Henley told me. “So when we have a quarterback in Justin Herbert, who’s out there playing post-surgery. We have guys who are going out there on their last leg and fighting their heart out—that’s the identity of this team. It doesn’t matter who we lose, it’s about what we do as a collective. Everybody matters on this team. There’s no one person greater than another.”

And evidently, no one loss that’ll make them stray from who they are.

Bo Nix and the Broncos clinched a postseason berth with their win over the Packers. / Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

Denver Broncos

The Broncos are 12–2, and their two losses were by razor-thin margins (29–28 on a leverage call that gave the Colts a second chance at a game-winning field goal in Week 2, and 23–20 on a Superman play by Herbert in Week 3’s loss to the Chargers).

While talking to Bo Nix after their 11th consecutive win on Sunday, I wondered if going through that so early in the year had any positive impact on a team that’s been red-hot since.

“It’s crazy,” Nix said. “The Colts, we led the whole game, and lost at the end. Same with the Chargers, we lost at the end. We didn’t feel like we got crushed. We were really close, but we didn’t finish those two. Here lately, we’ve just been finishing football games, and it’s been the close ones that have really put us over the hump. I don’t know the last time we won by two scores—every game is really close, and we just find ways to win, and every game, it’s been a different way to win.”

For the record, the Broncos’ last win by more than a single possession came in Week 8 against the Cowboys, and 10 of their last 11 wins have been one-possession games.

NFL schedule

As we’ve said before, the NFL views all 272 of its regular-season games and the 13 postseason games as pieces of real estate to sell to broadcast partners. That’s why it’s so crucial for the league to try and make every one of them consequential, which happens with more teams in the race later in the season, and why a situation like the Rams sitting guys in Week 18 last year was seen as a Code Red that led to reassessing playoff seeding.

Anyway, that makes it at least interesting that, with three weeks left in the schedule, more than a third of the league, 13 of 32 teams, had been eliminated from playoff consideration. Only Denver has clinched a playoff spot in the AFC, leaving eight teams fighting over six spots in the tournament. Only the Rams have clinched a playoff spot in the NFC, leaving nine teams fighting over six spots (and Dallas hanging by a thread).

Of course, we have a ton of great matchups coming over the next three weeks.

But there are a bunch of duds, too. And that’s something, I’d bet, the NFL will look at again.

NFL draft

Along those lines, the top five picks would go to, in order, right now: Giants, Raiders, Titans, Browns and Jets. And what’s so intriguing is that you have three teams (Raiders, Browns and Jets) that need a quarterback, and two (Giants and Titans) that just took one in the first round in 2024.

Whether Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza or Oregon’s Dante Moore becomes the consensus top pick, of course, remains to be seen. But if those guys get hot, and either the Titans or the Giants get that pick, the makeup of that top five could spark a bidding war.

Another critical piece of that puzzle is whether Moore comes out. We should find out soon how aggressive Oregon is in the transfer portal at QB.

Philip Rivers

Already excited for Philip Rivers on Monday Night Football this week against the 49ers.

Also, we’d be making an awful big deal of the back-shoulder throw Philip Rivers made to Alec Pierce on Sunday to set up Blake Grupe’s 60-yard, go-ahead field goal in Seattle, had that field goal stood up as the game winner. So I’ll say it here: It takes timing, work and chemistry with a receiver to make that kind of throw in that spot. The fact that Rivers did it after less than a week in the Colts’ building, coming off a five-year layoff, is remarkable.

Mike McDaniel

What’s Mike McDaniel’s status coming out of Monday’s loss? He has Cincinnati, Tampa and New England left on the schedule, so there’s ample opportunity for the Dolphins’ coach to show ownership he’s the right guy to pair with a new GM in 2026.

Washington Commanders

The Commanders did the right thing, shutting Jayden Daniels down. This has been a lost year there, in general. Best to get him pointed toward next year.

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