KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Before we get to the football we need to start here, a direct message to the many thousands of fans who drove snowy roads to stand outside for hours and watch something that's readily available through the magic of television:
Salute, and also, are you OK? Your decision making is both admirable and questionable.
The snow stuck on the heated field at Arrowhead Stadium from before kickoff to after the Chiefs' 23-3 win over the Denver Broncos was completed. That the weather affected play is beyond debate, and at least in terms of using Sunday's game to predict the rest of the season, this should be remembered as a factor.
That said, something significant happened.
Patrick Mahomes played like an MVP again.
His passes zipped, his confidence steadied, his feel for the pocket sharpened and he had perhaps his best game of the season, not to mention almost certainly his best since September.
He completed 27 of 34 passes, and many of them came with a high degree of difficulty. He stepped up in the middle of the pocket on a 41-yard touchdown pass to Tyreek Hill's double move, stepped away from pressure and still somehow had enough velocity to throw through a tight window on an out route by Mecole Hardman, and performed some sort of magic trick on a circular, loopedy-loop scramble for a two-point conversion to Sammy Watkins.
He did throw one interception, a bit of a heatcheck that he'd have been better off throwing away, but the impression had long been made.
The last three weeks had created this weird new version of reality in which the Chiefs' defense had become reliable and the offense flighty. There are a thousand factors that feed into that, and at times the drop from historical in 2018 has made people forget that Mahomes is likely having the second-best season for a quarterback in Chiefs history _ and the offense still ranks in the top three of various metrics.
But for this team to achieve its Super Bowl goal it needs every drop from the offense, and for most of the year that group has been fighting itself. Injuries have been an obvious factor, both in terms of talent and then timing.
Mahomes embodies much of that, from an ankle to a dislocated knee and then a hand injury last week. He has bailed clean pockets, let his footwork become sloppy and appeared to lose confidence in his protection or health ... or both.
We saw none of that against the Broncos. There were times when it looked like everyone was playing in the snow but him, his decisions and movements sharp, his passes reliably where they needed to be.
If he wasn't perfect he was damn close. If this is the beginning of the Chiefs' offense finding its 2018 mojo, playoff seeding might not matter very much.
