TAMPA, Fla. — The morning after the Super Bowl a year ago, a bleary-eyed Patrick Mahomes arrived at a news conference and hugged Minnie Mouse in a preview of his imminent trip to Disney World.
Then he stepped behind a podium as he collected the Most Valuable Player award for his pivotal role in the 31-20 comeback win over San Francisco.
At 24, Mahomes was the youngest player ever to be so recognized … and surely the first to make good on a feeling he had envied on Twitter years before: “I bet it feels amazing to be the quarterback who says ‘I’m going to Disney World’ after winning the Super Bowl,’ ” he wrote in February 2013.
It was all “surreal,” he said, and so began a victory lap that included some uncharacteristically unrestrained celebration in the days ahead.
But despite the truly incredible early success of his NFL career, including being named league MVP in his first full season as a starter the year before, Mahomes soon returned to training with the same ferocity as ever.
Even amid a pandemic and contract negotiations and his deepening involvement in social justice initiatives.
Even as he became engaged to longtime girlfriend Brittany Matthews and they announced her pregnancy.
Because winning that Super Bowl didn’t so much culminate that ambition, or even vision, as validate it and commence it in earnest.
You could see it in his offseason workouts with longtime trainer Bobby Stroupe, as most recently chronicled by Men’s Health. Or you could know it from word of mouth, such as offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy last August calling him a “competitive prick.”
It’s Mahomes, coach Andy Reid said in training camp, who “keeps practice alive, challenges the defense, and really makes everyone around him better just by his attitude and how he goes about it.”
You saw all this unfurl anew during a 14-2 regular-season … only for the Chiefs to ultimately unravel in Sunday night’s 31-9 loss to Tampa Bay in Super Bowl LV, with Mahomes frequently left skedaddling for his life behind a patchwork offensive line.
This was about as rotten as a sequel could play out, with the Chiefs becoming just the third team in Super Bowl history to fail to score a touchdown and appearing helpless most of the game.
Some of what happened will get fixed in the natural course of things, assuming, for instance, that offensive linemen Eric Fisher, Mitchell Schwartz and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif all are able to return to their form of last season.
But there are plenty of other concerns to fret over, including whether Tampa Bay just created a defensive blueprint for stifling Mahomes.
Just the same, let’s remember Mahomes still is just getting started.
And this is why we circled back to last year first. Let’s remember, too, that someone immune to complacency and infinitely capable of conjuring perceived slights as motivational fodder figures to be all the more obsessive coming off a humiliating defeat on the most visible stage.
So on this Monday morning after the Super Bowl, a resolute Mahomes considered the question about how his motivation might be different this time around.
“If you’re a competitor, and you get so close to your ultimate goal, and you fall short, it’s something that will motivate you for the rest of your career,” he said, adding that this was a feeling he didn’t want to experience ever again.
In a similar vein, he later added, “It’s not the end of something. It’s going to be another chapter.”
While the nature of the loss itself was far more unsettling, the notion was reminiscent of how the 37-31 overtime loss to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game two seasons ago landed with me.
Coming in Mahomes’ first season as a starter, that wasn’t just another agonizing Chiefs’ playoff loss; it felt like the beginning of so much more.
Nothing is assured now, of course. But the Chiefs will return the nucleus of a team that punctuated winning a Super Bowl with the best regular season in franchise history and by becoming one of the rare teams to even get back the next season.
And they’ll be again led by the yet-magical Mahomes, who reaffirmed his charismatic leadership both after the game and on Monday morning. He emphasized his own part in what went awry … even as he noted receivers weren’t always where he expected them to be (as opposed to saying not where they were supposed to be or, in fact, securing the balls thrown right to them) and allowed as how the offensive line was good at times but “sometimes they let guys through.”
“A lot of times it gets put on the line because I’m scrambling around,” he said. “But if we’re not executing as far as me making the right reads (and) getting the ball out of my hands to the receivers on time, then nothing’s going to work.
“So (the line gets) that blame sometimes when it’s not deserved … A lot of it’s on me, and people just don’t see it that way.”
This is part of why teammates love him and want to do more for him. And he’ll reinforce that with his work ethic in the months to come. Everything has to get better, starting with new ways and new plays and him physically and mentally.
And, well, in every way possible with a child on the way soon.
“So I’ve got to work on becoming a better dad,” he said, smiling, “even though I haven’t even become one yet.”
But he’s been a champion before. And here’s betting he’ll be one again.
“When we kind of joined together, we knew it wasn’t always going to be successful and you weren’t going to be able to win a thousand championships in a row,” he said Sunday night. “We knew we were going to go through times like this and adversity. …
“Obviously, we didn’t end the season the way we wanted to. We can learn from that, we can learn from the successes we had during the season. And at the end of the day we have to come into this next year with a blank slate and try to find a way to get back to the Super Bowl again.”
