Patrick Mahomes has been the most transformative player in Kansas City Chiefs history entering just his seventh season with the team, and sixth as their starting quarterback. He is the topic of sports talk shows on a daily basis, arguably the face of the NFL, and is chasing greatest-of-all-time status with every mounting accolade.
But some fans are simply tired of hearing about it. Across the league, there is pervasive exhaustion after coverage of Kansas City’s signal caller reached a fever pitch after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win in February. Well-known commentators Rich Eisen and Jim Nantz discussed the subject on the former’s eponymous radio show, where they delved into his spot in the pantheon of AFC quarterbacks.
When Eisen implied that Mahomes was the only quarterback in the league with an outside shot of matching Brady’s rings and numbers, Nantz agreed, admonishing some fans’ fatigue with the reigning MVP’s ubiquity in the sports media landscape.
“Listen, sometimes people grow weary or tired of winners and the story repeating itself, but it’s kind of like Tiger [Woods] back in his heyday,” He explained. “You may root for him, a lot of people did, you may not root for him. And there were those out there that weren’t rooting for him because they just grew tired of watching him play all the time.
“Why are you guys showing him so much? But the truth is everybody wants to know what he’s doing at all times, and that is the same thing [that] pertains to Mahomes. You want to know what he’s doing, and he’s got three Super Bowl appearances, he’s got two rings… Yeah, it’s hard to handicap it when you’re talking about a player still in his 20s and you’ve got so much talent out there.”
Especially given his age, to Nantz’s point, Mahomes is something of a unicorn with the accomplishments and prestige that the has brought to his team in such a short amount of time. The comparison to Woods may have an apples-to-oranges quality to it given that football is a team sport and golf isn’t, but the point still stands.
The message from Nantz, who has covered football for decades, was loud and clear, though. Mahomes’ unbelievable hype and gravitas won’t be going away any time soon, and fans should buckle up for even more coverage during the 2023 season.
