There was this thing that Andy Reid said to me about Patrick Mahomes a couple of weeks ago that stuck with me, and I can’t let it go. His Chiefs had just dispatched the Raiders to lock up the top seed in the AFC and move to within one win of the team’s fifth AFC title game in as many years, and in five years with Mahomes as starter.
This time, though, they’d done it without Tyreek Hill.
“Well, the part of the equation that people didn’t talk much about—they talked about how it hurt Pat, not how it helped Pat in a way that he’d have to grow in different directions,” Reid told me after the Chiefs beat the Raiders in Week 18. “That’s what he did, and he knew it; he knew what he had to do. So he jumped in, and you gotta give him credit for that. He jumped feet-first and helped teach those kids. Made them feel a part of it.”
