Shortly before his fourth and most unusual NFL training camp, back in August 2020, Patrick Mahomes invited his closest friends and family members to his Texas-sized, Dallas–Fort Worth–area mansion for a socially distant pool party/barbecue. He knew he wouldn’t visit with most of them in person again until after the season ended. Understanding the collective and personal sacrifices ahead, he left his own party for much of the afternoon to go see his paternal grandparents, who couldn’t be at the gathering. He planned all this to eliminate any lingering obligations. After all, he had another Super Bowl to win.
The quarterback’s private chef laid out a proper brunch spread, featuring fruit and pastries and made-to-order omelets. Everyone jumped in the pool, swimming and lounging and dividing into volleyball teams, until the party’s host returned. Then the chef grilled cheeseburgers. Mahomes doused his in ketchup, proving at once how much had changed (look who did the grilling) and how much had not (the menu, along with the condiment he could eat by itself).
As Mahomes continued his professional evolution, from starter to league MVP to international fame, analysts focused on the numbers and accomplishments. They didn’t know that many of his most important transformations in the most transformative year of his life would take place away from the field.
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His mother, Randi, did what mothers do. She worried. About his future, the pandemic, the title-or-bust expectations, a season that promised mostly virtual contact and, always, the menacing defenders in rabid pursuit. But on that day, before the season started, she scoured her son’s pantry and noticed something that soothed her anxiety: stacks of Cool Ranch Doritos, her son’s favorite food. She most wanted Patrick to retain himself in this new vacuum of private-chef celebrity, to change less than everything—and everyone—around him, despite the microscope he lives under and the millions in the bank. “You look at all the changes, whether it’s how big he is or this mustache he has right now that’s driving me bananas, but he’s still the same,” she said then. Right down to his snacks.
Mother and son, Team Mahomes and Chiefs Kingdom and a nation of football obsessives all understood the stakes. Mahomes had set them himself, after an AFC championship game triumph the previous season over Tennessee. Onstage, with safety Tyrann Mathieu and tight end Travis Kelce, the quarterback said things like, “Let’s start a dynasty.”
“Obviously big words,” he said in the lead-up to Super Bowl LV two seasons ago. “But you believe them.”
He believed them so much, in fact, that when his mother reminded him of one of her favorite sayings from his childhood, how whenever she needed him to do something or go somewhere, she would say, “I don’t care if it’s the Super Bowl ..., ” and he would comply with rolling eyes. Randi told Patrick that because she wanted him to savor his first experience, in Super Bowl LIV, to realize that some players reach the NFL pinnacle, never to return. Patrick didn’t roll his eyes this time.
“It’s not once in a lifetime, Mom,” he said. “We’ll be back.”
Indeed, Mahomes led his Chiefs to their second Super Bowl title in four years, winning MVP after throwing for three touchdowns in a 38–35 victory over the Eagles Sunday night at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.
Flash forward through almost three seasons, past the Super Bowl loss (February 2021), the AFC championship game collapse (January 2022), the ankle injury (January 2023) and everything else. Patrick Mahomes wasn’t wrong. The Chiefs did go back; the Super Bowl wasn’t once in a lifetime, and he provided more proof this season in epic, dramatic fashion. But his mom wasn’t wrong, either. NFL greatness was trickier, yearly, every season fraught with complications, new faces and shifting landscapes.
A million adjectives have been thrown around to describe Patrick Lavon Mahomes II, who is now 27 years old, married to his high school sweetheart and the father of two kids, an almost-2-year-old daughter and a newborn son. But the people who know him best settle on one word. Thoughtful. That’s how they describe him.
Chiefs general manager Brett Veach says Mahomes still acts like a rookie at team headquarters, in terms not of football but of politeness. He chats with the employees who answer phones at the front desk. He answers phone calls from Veach and others on the first ring. He’s still all yes, sir; no, sir. He’s not, in other words, engulfed or even tinged by the celebrity tsunami that swirls all around him. “Thoughtful,” Veach says, “is actually an understatement.”
What does any of this have to do with football? A lot, actually. Mahomes is his team’s best, most accomplished and most important player. He’s also its binding agent, the quarterback equivalent of resin. He brought all the Chiefs’ new receivers to Fort Worth last summer and didn’t train them, exactly. He coached them, ensuring an offense that lost Tyreek Hill would still function, just in a different way.
This year Mahomes lifted Kansas City. Always has. Continues to. Teammates and coaches point to his attitude (generally positive), his mindset (stronger than that right arm), his willingness to seek camaraderie and his normal-ness (check out that Chad Henne bobblehead sitting atop his locker). All speak to what the QB who mentored him believes is the concept that most defines Mahomes. “Competitiveness,” says Alex Smith, who started in 2017 before Mahomes took over the following season. “I would love to say that I saw everything coming, but yeah, no. I don’t know why I always use the word pure to describe him that way. But that’s it.”
Pure equates to joy. Pure means no fear of failure. Pure means Mahomes being himself when everything around him changes. He just wants to play. Out back. In massive, raucous NFL stadiums. Or, as Reid likes to say, in a McDonald’s parking lot. “He’s let’s go, let’s play,” Smith says. “And in professional sports, when there’s all these other things, all this s--- that people are dealing with, that they have in their brains, Patrick just keeps it pure.”
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As the Chiefs wound back to their third Super Bowl appearance in the past four seasons, their quarterback showed the NFL just what Smith meant. Want pure? Start with an increasingly bitter rival, a fifth consecutive year hosting the AFC championship game, a high ankle sprain and what NFL Films might describe in a dramatic voice-over as “intestinal fortitude.”
Mahomes didn’t simply play when others would have sat. Late in the third quarter, he stepped up in the pocket, decisively and undoubtedly with much pain, planted on that injured ankle, in the face of an oncoming rush, and threw a dart to Marquez Valdes-Scantling that put Kansas City ahead of the Bengals, 20–13. “The most memorable thing I’ve seen him do in a game,” Smith says.
In some ways, maybe he was acting, says Modern Family star and notable Chiefs diehard Eric Stonestreet. The actor once agreed to play a role on The Mentalist, where he would be shot and killed and fall to his knees repeatedly. In practicing, he injured a knee. He would later find out he had a slight tear in his meniscus, but he focused on the role and did the shoot because “being on a TV show, you don’t get to call in sick.” He notes that what Mahomes did was far beyond that, that he cannot relate to playing quarterback on an injury that severe. But he can relate to the spirit involved, the desire to do something that most wouldn’t dare think about, let alone attempt.
“I’ve always said there’s a degree of sandbagging with Patrick Mahomes,” Stonestreet says. “The way he kind of moves around in pregame, and he never seems that fast. People make memes about him running, and he kind of has that awkward trot. But I think he knows how to do exactly what I would do in auditions. And that’s to have the ability to lower expectations and then exceed them.”
While in college at Texas Tech, Mahomes studied film of one legend more than any other: Tom Brady (of course). Mahomes thought about that after losing the AFC championship game to Brady and the Patriots five seasons ago, after Brady stopped by the Chiefs’ locker room and told Mahomes to stay in process and “keep being who you are.” Mahomes called that brief meeting “very important” as a marker for how far he’d come and a hint of what lay ahead.
Randi sometimes marvels at one picture from the past. There’s her kindergartner, clad in a maroon gown and hat. That kid will now, in all likelihood, replace the newly retired Brady as the face of the NFL. He’ll do it with Brady’s help, while helping everyone around him.
Pretty thoughtful, right?
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