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.
