That was the worst game of Patrick Mahomes’ career.
Super Bowl 59 was over before Kendrick Lamar took the field at halftime. The most obvious reason was that Patrick Mahomes’ unimpeded journey to greatest-of-all-time status took a bit of a detour.
The Kansas City Chiefs were flat all around, their offensive line obliterated by an inspired Philadelphia defensive front. It wasn’t all Mahomes’ fault. But his career-long greatness and his team’s other failures shouldn’t obscure his piece of what happened here. The best football player in the world had a chance to become the first three-peat champion ever, and he played the worst ball any of us have ever seen from him.
A loss, even a 40–22 rout like this one, is only so surprising. The Mahomes Chiefs already lost one of these things in similar fashion, when Tom Brady’s Buccaneers (and more specifically a voracious Tampa Bay defense) crushed Kansas City to end the 2020 season. The Chiefs were 1-point favorites this year, an inch better than a tossup to win their fourth title with Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Andy Reid. The Mahomes guarantee is that the Chiefs will be within a skip and a jump of winning this game every season, not that they’ll always convert. Three wins in five attempts is solid. He’ll get his fourth one some time down the line.
Goddamn, though. Mahomes was simply dogshit in this game. He looked much more like Daniel Jones or Carson Wentz or late-stage Aaron Rodgers than the football demigod that he is. It will not define his legacy, but it will subtly shift how a lot of football people remember him. To say otherwise would be to concede that winning a third title in a row wouldn’t have been a big deal either.
The best player in the biggest sport in the country had a chance to do something that nobody had done before. He not only didn’t do it but turned in the kind of performance that will make people wonder eternally if he got food poisoning or if his insufferable little brother put on his jersey and helmet. Haters may never again see an athlete of Mahomes’ stature play like this in a moment like that.
Lots of commentators who don’t feel comfortable dumping on Mahomes will default to pointing out that his blockers got worked over. They will have a point. The Chiefs’ offensive line has been leaky all season in pass protection, allowing a 24 percent pressure rate on QB dropbacks, according to Sports Reference. The Eagles are no longer the defense that nearly set the NFL sacks record two years ago, when these teams last met in the Super Bowl. But Philly has a solid, deep group of pass rushers and most importantly has a freak of nature defensive tackle, Jalen Carter, who was not around in the last matchup. They were the NFL’s No. 1 defense by expected points added and No. 2 in points allowed, and they played like it. These Eagles front players were dominant all night, throwing the K.C. offensive line backward and rarely giving Mahomes a clean throwing platform. The Chiefs had no running game to speak of given the circumstances.
We can lay many of Mahomes’ shortcomings in this game at his protection’s feet. His second interception, a duck to Eagles middle linebacker Zack Baun, happened because Philly’s Josh Sweat heaved Joe Thuney, the Chiefs’ left tackle, into Mahomes’ chest as he released the ball. On a handful of plays, the Eagles displaced the Chiefs backward and left Mahomes with no option but to run for his life. On these plays, this Super Bowl felt a lot like that loss against the Bucs to end the pandemic season. The most encapsulating moment of the game was when one Eagle strip-sacked Mahomes in the fourth quarter and then another decked him once the ball was on the ground. The Eagles did not blitz all night and harassed Mahomes anyway, leaving him with few options downfield. He was in a losing situation.
Mahomes was bad, though. This is the quarterback whose coach claimed to have once told him, “When it’s grim, be the Grim Reaper,” and almost always, Mahomes has been. Here, he flirted with disaster all evening, starting with a third-down throw on the Chiefs’ first drive. The Eagles flushed him from the pocket, and Mahomes had room to run for a short gain or throw the ball away. He instead tried to fit in a low-percentage throw along the sideline, which fell incomplete but could’ve easily ended with one of two Eagles defenders taking it the other way for a touchdown. That’s exactly what happened when a pressing Mahomes threw on the run in the second quarter and didn’t see rookie cornerback Cooper DeJean.
Mahomes was just never normal. He is football’s best magician, with a legendary mixtape of narrow escapes-turned explosive plays. In this game, on the rare cases where he seemed to be making up for his line’s failures, he then messed up himself. The moment when the game felt over to me was when Mahomes scampered free on the Chiefs’ last drive of the first half and targeted a wide-open DeAndre Hopkins for what was about to be the first big Kansas City play of the night. Mahomes missed him by a mile. Later, down 27-0 in the third quarter, Mahomes had Hopkins near the sideline on a fourth down-and-3. This time the receiver had a defender covering him pretty well, but a good Mahomes throw would’ve beaten him. Instead, the QB was a bit off, and the Eagles took over on downs.
Mahomes finished 21-of-32 for 257 yards, with three touchdowns and two interceptions. He was, as anyone who watched the game will attest, much, much worse than that. Everything positive in his line was the result of garbage time stat-padding after the Eagles jumped ahead 34–0. The historical record may not accurately reflect how woeful Mahomes was in this game, but the 120 million-ish people (give or take, once we learn the TV ratings) who watched will always share the secret. Mahomes’ rating was 18.1 with a few minutes left in the third quarter, a number that would have given him a real case as having the worst outing of any QB in the NFL all season. Instead, it suffices to say that Mahomes had a worse night relative to expectations than anybody has ever had in, um, all of North American professional sports? Maybe!
Most of the greats lose a Super Bowl here or there, the cost of doing business at this level. Brady, who was calling this game for Fox, lost three Super Bowls. Peyton Manning lost one in which he was only a bit better than Mahomes was in New Orleans. This game will go down as the biggest blot on Mahomes’ C.V., though, and one that stands apart as a bit more bizarre than any other. Winning three in a row would have been unbelievably cool. Losing at the end of a close game would’ve even been pretty cool. This, however, was not cool, and it will nuke the aura of inevitability that has justifiably surrounded the Mahomes Chiefs.
Anyway, that was a bizarre night. Mahomes will win more games against the Buffalo Bills and probably go ahead and claim another Super Bowl or five. The team’s status as the NFL’s team of the decade was already assured, as was the quarterback’s bust in Canton. All the Eagles did was dispense with the idea that any quarterback, even Mahomes, can overcome playing the worst game of his life on the same night that his offensive line constitutes a legitimate violation of workplace safety standards. There is nobody like Patrick Mahomes, but on the wrong day, Patrick Mahomes is not unlike everybody else.
