Patrick Mahomes, the Super Bowl’s final boss who evolved towards greatness

The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback is one win away from a third-straight championship. But he is a different player from when he first lit up the NFL. Patrick Mahomes is the final boss. Somehow, some way, it always comes down to him. From the moment he became the Kansas City Chiefs’ starting quarterback in 2018 he has turned the NFL into a video game of sorts, waiting at the highest levels to knock off all challengers. The longer he looms at the top, the more he seems like a glitch.

On Sunday, the Chiefs will face the Philadelphia Eagles with football immortality at stake. With a victory, Kansas City would become the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row. The championship run started with the Chiefs beating the Eagles two years ago in Super Bowl LVII. As much as Philadelphia’s size advantages on the offensive and defensive lines and the addition of game-breaking running back Saquon Barkley make them look like the better overall team heading into the rematch, the mere fact that the Chiefs have Mahomes and the Eagles don’t is why you’d sooner trust a cat to babysit a goldfish than bet against Mahomes. “If it’s a one-score game, I’m taking Patrick Mahomes any time because he’s just got that championship DNA,” Tom Brady said earlier this season.

Consider that source for a moment: Brady, by consensus the greatest quarterback of all time, won a record seven championships while playing for the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Two of those came at Mahomes’s expense – in the 2018 season, when Brady’s Patriots beat the Chiefs in the AFC championship in Mahomes’s first year as the Chiefs’ starting quarterback; and two years later, when the Bucs beat the Chiefs on home soil in the Super Bowl itself. Each time, Mahomes gave Kansas City a fighting chance just by having the ball in hands. It’s only Brady’s good luck that he caught him early in his career.

Sunday will mark Mahomes’s fifth Super Bowl appearance. He’s already won the game three times and been voted the most valuable player in each victory. What’s more, he hasn’t even turned 30. Between those trophies and his staggering overall win totals and passing statistics, Mahomes would probably make it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame if he retired on Monday. A third straight championship – something Brady never achieved – would make it a moot point.

In the early stages of his career, Brady was the underdog, the “puny” (to league talent evaluators anyway) late-round draft choice who was thrust into duty after a freak injury to New England’s starter Drew Bledsoe and kept on rising to meet the moment. His dink-and-dunk pocket passing style conformed to the geometry of the game. He had a great partner to weather the ebbs and flows in Bill Belichick, the mastermind coach who guided his every step (until their breakup following the 2019 season, after 20 years together).

Mahomes? He’s the villain lurking inside the fortress, ready to knock his challengers back to square one. He’s slippery, spiky and can fire a ball just about every way imaginable. Where Brady had to contend with Peyton Manning for years, Mahomes holds back one of the best generation of quarterbacks the game has seen. The Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson, a two-time league MVP, has only beaten Mahomes once. Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, this year’s NFL MVP, fell to Kansas City in last month’s AFC championship, marking the third time in four seasons that Mahomes has topped him in the playoffs.

Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts played the game of his life when the Eagles faced the Chiefs in the Super Bowl two years ago only to wind up losing after Mahomes drained all the time off the clock. (“He made the plays when they mattered most,” Hurts said after the game. “That’s what the great ones do.”) The only top-level quarterback to hold a head-to-head edge over Mahomes is Joe Burrow, most notably in a victory in the 2022 AFC championship game – but that boast only goes so far when you play for the bungling Cincinnati Bengals.

In the days leading up to games Mahomes goes through a metamorphosis – from mild-mannered father of three to ruthless “creature” with “a look in his eye that normal people don’t have,” Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, Matt Nagy, recently told the Athletic. That crunch-time creature brings out the sweat like Michael Jordan trailing in the fourth quarter or Novak Djokovic with his back against the wall in a five-setter: you know it’s a matter of time before he pulls the rabbit out of the hat. But the truly impressive thing about Mahomes is how much he has evolved as a threat. In his early seasons in Kansas City, he piled up the passing yards while chucking deep balls to star receivers Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce, and otherwise dazzling defenses with no-look throws and tosses with his weaker left hand.