Looking for the Silver Lining in an Awful Day for the Chiefs

Patrick Mahomes suffered a torn ACL, but the long road to recovery can give him and his team a much-needed break.

The Chiefs were eliminated from the playoff race Sunday, and now Patrick Mahomes is facing a long recovery. / Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images

We’re already thinking it, right? Patrick Mahomes, because he’s Patrick Mahomes, is going to recover from the torn ACL he sustained against the Chargers on Sunday faster than anyone else. He’ll be ready for September. The Chiefs’ offense will be fine. Mahomes will be fine. It’s a straight line between here and CBS’s game of the week, just after Labor Day, with Tony Romo salivating about the way the three-time Super Bowl champion circumnavigates around some backfield littered with defenders to dump off a swing pass to Kareem Hunt. Nature finds a way. 

But maybe today was the universe’s way of asking us to stop heaping expectations on this wunderkind-turned-legend. Stop comparing his recovery to Tom Brady’s lone lost season to the same injury. Stop wondering what this means in some nebulous and undefinable concept of greatness. Stop everything, because Mahomes, who has played the equivalent of an extra season’s worth of postseason games since arriving as Kansas City’s starting quarterback (21 of them), hasn’t been able to. Not once. 

I think there are two main reasons why this could be a great blessing in disguise and the first is forcing a player with maniacal energy to take a step back. Just look at Mahomes’s post on social media about the injury, which led with “Don’t know why this had to happen.” He clearly feels weight. Pressure. A world temporarily coming to an end. And it’s difficult to blame him. When you’re as good as Mahomes, when you’re as successful as Mahomes, when you’re as marketable as Mahomes, an entire economy is dependent on your ability to stay transcendently great. Imagine sprinting on a treadmill at world record pace with the knowledge that you can never, ever get off. 

We are in the age of burnout. Andrew Luck walked away (after a series of nonquarterback retirements before the age of 30 that rocked the NFL). Sean McVay almost walked away. Joe Burrow, just last week, talked about how his professional and personal life have taken a sledgehammer. I remember meeting Burrow for the first time and seeing the facial expressions he made when talking about his inability to go out in public and just be a normal person. It leaves a mark. 

And while rehabilitation from an injury like this offers its own kind of personal hell—defined mostly by tedium—perhaps Mahomes having to be responsible for only himself and his budding young family for once will be a welcome change of pace. I’m not trying to heap my own pocket psychoanalysis on him or anyone, but in order to be as great as Mahomes is you have to be swallowed by the pursuit of continued greatness. It is the water you swim in, so omnipresent that you don’t even realize the makeup of your own microuniverse. The only way to stop, even for a second, is when pinned to a training table. 

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The second perk? The Chiefs need a break of their own. Even with Mahomes all year, the Chiefs fell to 6–8 Sunday and were officially eliminated from the playoff race. The roster around the quarterback has become, like a once-great hotel room or restaurant kitchen, suspect when examined under blue light. This is by design, by the way, despite what overly haughty Chiefs fans have come to believe. Dynasties have been litigated out of the sport. It’s supposed to be harder to field a team built with draft picks no higher than picks 31 or 32. Your divisional opponents are supposed to build a team specifically designed to stop you and hire the best coaches in the universe to do so. Your top receiving option—a once little-known converted tight end from just outside of Cleveland—is supposed to become unfathomably famous, marry the most powerful woman on earth, decline on the field somewhat rapidly and soar into a life of Met Gala appearances and Esquire covers. Who hasn’t seen this movie before?

In all seriousness, having the Chiefs bottom out is probably the best-case scenario for a team that is millions of dollars over the salary cap to start next season and is perforated with holes across its roster. Cost-controlled talent will not only save the franchise, but will pad the eventual runway for whenever Mahomes makes his return to the field. What a gift it would be if 2026 was a no-pressure developmental campaign for a future left tackle, anchor No. 1 wide receiver or cornerback to design a new defense around that doesn’t revolve so heavily on a generational interior pass rush. 

Through the late-afternoon window Sunday, the Chiefs are set to pick 12th in the 2026 draft and, if the roster remains largely the same without Mahomes this coming year, much higher after that. Like the 49ers’ scuffling start under Kyle Shanahan that brought the team Nick Bosa, getting four years from an elite cornerstone player can dramatically change the way this team operates. 

But, look at us, ahead of ourselves again. For when Mahomes comes back. For when the Chiefs retool. For that next Super Bowl. Comeback Player of the Year. MVP. The only job Andy Reid and Brett Veach, the Hunt family and anyone else in that building have is to ensure Mahomes feels as supported as Kansas City has by him over the past eight years. To help him answer his own question about why this had to happen.

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