Patrick Mahomes: ‘Anything Less’ Than Super Bowl Isn’t Success
In the Kansas City Chiefs' AFC Championship Game loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, it was a tale of two halves for quarterback Patrick Mahomes. In the first 30 minutes of the contest, he was precise and the Chiefs' offense hummed along smoothly. In the next 30 minutes and into overtime, he struggled and the entire offense did as a result.
Heading into the season, many expected Mahomes to put up league-leading numbers behind a revamped offensive line. Despite losing wide receiver Sammy Watkins to free agency, the MVP-winning quarterback was supposed to have enough in the cupboard to make up for that. Throughout the regular season, he slowly progressed from being skittish and erratic to surgical and elite once again. That all went out the window once Mahomes stepped out of the locker room for the third quarter on Sunday and after the game, he explained what went wrong.
"There's a few misreads here and there," Mahomes said. "There was guys that were open and I didn't hit at the right time or I passed up on something shorter and I wanted to get something deeper down the field. When you're playing in a good team and you don't hit what's there and you try to get a little bit more than what's necessary, it kinda bites you in the butt, I guess you could say."
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) walks to the sidelines in the fourth quarter AFC championship NFL football game, Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo. Cincinnati Bengals defeated Kansas City Chiefs 27-24. Cincinnati Bengals At Kansas City Chiefs Jan 30 Afc Championship 89
All year long, the Chiefs' downfalls have subsided and then shown back up later on. That's happened in spurts, but the team hadn't strung together downright dominant or complete performances in 2021-22 as it had in years past. On the biggest stage of the season, inconsistency reared its ugly head once again. It prevented Kansas City from advancing to the Super Bowl and while qualifying for the AFC title game is no small feat, Mahomes knows the team came up short of its ultimate goal.
“I mean you take away the good things just like any season," Mahomes said. "It’s definitely disappointing. Here with this group of guys that we have, we expect to be in that game and to win that game. Anything less than that is not success. We’ll go back and look at the things we did well, the adversity we battled through, the better team we became towards the end of the season and try to learn from the mistakes that we made and try to be better next year.”
With a lot to figure out this offseason, the Chiefs have their work cut out for them. On the other hand, they have the most difficult position in the league figured out, have plenty of star power elsewhere on the roster and boast one of the league's best head coach-general manager duos. That's one heck of a starting point to work from and moving forward, Kansas City's name should be brought up in the contender conversation every season. Mahomes and the Chiefs' poor second-half showing didn't doom them moving forward but for this year's purposes, it indeed was not a success.
