At the time, Patrick Mahomes didn’t know what would become of the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.
Seven years into his career, and going into Year 8, the Chiefs’ quarterback had been around long enough to know that plenty can happen between the dog days of training camp and February. But, the three-time champion also knew there was a way to give himself the best chance to return to the big game, and it went back to the advice Tom Brady gave in a quiet corner of Arrowhead Stadium in January 2019.
Brady told Mahomes, “to just keep doing what I’m doing.” And, Mahomes told me, he still considers it the best advice he’s ever gotten as a pro.
Six months later, it’s gotten him and his teammates back to February—again.
It’s the fifth time in six years that the Chiefs have extended their season past January and into the Super Bowl, which has never been done. In 13 days, they’ll have a shot at becoming the first team to win three consecutive Lombardi Trophies—something Terry Bradshaw’s Pittsburgh Steelers, Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers and Brady’s New England Patriots all failed to do after winning back-to-back titles. And the reality is, this Chiefs season has embodied the advice given to Mahomes from No. 12.
The plan back in August looked so clear. Mahomes didn’t know then that Hollywood Brown wouldn’t make his Chiefs debut until Christmas. He didn’t know that not one (Kingsley Suamataia), but two (Wanya Morris) promising young left tackles would need to be sat down, and a veteran would be signed at midseason (D.J. Humphries), only to have a guard (Joe Thuney) end up being the answer at the position. He didn’t know the corner situation would look untenable in December, or that Chris Jones would play through an injury, too.
But what Mahomes did know was that there’d be a way, even if it wasn’t the plan he and Andy Reid, and guys such as Jones, Travis Kelce, Matt Nagy and Steve Spagnuolo had mapped out for the Chiefs back in the summer. And here they are, again.
“We dealt with so much adversity at the beginning of the year, and we just kept winning,” Mahomes told me in a quiet moment after Kansas City’s AFC championship win over the Buffalo Bills. “We found ways to win at the end of the day. Games like today—and the defense getting that stop, when we only got a field goal at the end, that’s just stuff we did from the beginning of the year. It’s made us hardened. It’s made us even better for the adversity we dealt with. I’m just glad we got some of those guys that were injured back, and now we can see the vision [we had] for the offense.
“We’re going to need it because we’re going up against a great team in Philadelphia.”
Indeed, they are. And that path Mahomes laid out is why it’ll be so hard for the Eagles to beat the Chiefs in two weeks—just like it’s proven borderline impossible for every other team this year.
We made it—Super Bowl LIX is all that’s left on the calendar. And we’ve got a lot more than just that to cover this week. So over in this week’s Takeaways, you’ll find …
• How the Chiefs’ coaches trusted their players in the biggest moment, and what the massively underappreciated Nick Sirianni has brought this Eagles group.
• A detailed look at how the New York Jets arrived on Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey.
• A debriefing on the Florida drama swirling around former Tampa Bay Buccaneers OC and now Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen.
And a whole lot more.
But we’re starting at Arrowhead Stadium, where the Chiefs dynasty wrote some more pages in another dramatic Mahomes–Reid chapter.
Perhaps the most compelling team statistic of the 2024 season—to me at least—was the 30-point anomaly. Just three teams failed to score 30 points in a game this season. Two of them, the Las Vegas Raiders and Patriots, posted 4–13 seasons. The other team is the Chiefs.
Finally, on Sunday, Kansas City got over that hump.
That, again, is indicative of a team that simply does whatever it takes. This is my first thought on the Super Bowl as we start to turn the page toward New Orleans. This Chiefs team may be a little different than the past few in that they can play their game and win, and then they can turn around and play your game and win.
That goes back to Brady’s advice to Mahomes, and the Chiefs’ belief that if they simply keep doing what they’re doing, and have done for all these years, the results will work out.
“The guys here, it’s really special,” says defensive captain Nick Bolton. “Watching from training camp going all the way to where we’re at now, the growth, the trust, the belief they have in the guys around them is one of the things that’s truly special. I’m happy to be around it.”
It showed all year.
In the past two weeks, with his team down badly at his position, young corner Jaylen Watson dragged himself out there and far exceeded the pitch count Spagnuolo and the trainers put him on—playing 59% of the defensive snaps against the Houston Texans, and 71% against Buffalo, after there was some thought weeks ago that he’d be out for the year. Thuney, the Chiefs’ ironman, was airtight at his new position when it mattered most. Brown and Xavier Worthy also returned to help bring the vision Reid and Nagy had for the offense back in the summer to life.
All these things don’t coalesce at once by accident. It’s indicative of a program that always has answers, no matter the opponent, the setting or even the style of fight it finds itself in.
It’s also a result of having the tone-setters the Chiefs do in their Holy Trinity.
Kelce turns 36 this year. The AFC championship was, by his standard, a quiet game. But he played more than 70% of the offensive snaps and had an 11-yard catch with less than six minutes left to put the Chiefs in Harrison Butker’s range for the game-winning field goal. Chris Jones turns 31 this year and suffered a calf injury in December. Yet, he played over 70% of the snaps on defense and was the linchpin in Kansas City’s rugged short-yardage looks.
And then, there was Mahomes. Going in, the Chiefs knew the Bills would likely be heavy on man-to-man looks, so there’d be opportunities for the quarterback to run—both on designed option plays, and pass plays with built-in run options for the passer.
I asked Mahomes if he knew he’d run more on Sunday, and he smiled.
“Kind of,” he says. “We just had the option so I could read it. The one I scored on, we actually ran it earlier in the game and we had a touchdown on it. I knew they solved the run, so the defensive end closed down [on the running back]. I was able to pull it. And they played man-to-man coverage—they play man a lot of the time. The quarterback could run and I was able to see that.”
But saying that is one thing. Doing it in a high-leverage situation is another.
And Mahomes didn’t just dabble in running the ball. He went all in.
Mahomes finished the game with 11 carries. Excluding three kneeldowns, and one aborted exchange that counted as a carry, his seven runs accounted for four first downs and two touchdowns (the other was a seven-yard run in the fourth quarter that put the Chiefs at second-and-3). It’s the most carries he’s had in a playoff game and marked only the fourth time in his illustrious career that he’s finished with double-digit carries.
To him, though, it was simpler than any of that. It was what his team needed from him to win—an ethos that has come to define this year’s Chiefs.
This is where you stop and catch yourself from painting a 15–2 juggernaut chasing a fourth Super Bowl title in six years as the Little Engine That Could.
The Chiefs have way more going for them than just guts and guile.
But the man who built the team, GM Brett Veach, would be the first to point to what has elevated all that talent on the roster—and there’s plenty. Amid a healthy dose of adversity and unforeseen circumstances, they’ve kept—to borrow the phrase—doing what they’re doing. And things have a way of working out when your starting point is Reid’s voice in Mahomes’s helmet.
“There’s that element, our players have been there and done that,” Veach says. “There’s a lot of trust in the coaching staff and players. It’s no different from the Super Bowl when [Marquez Valdes-Scantling] called that fourth-down play and it’s like, Yeah, I think we can run this play. And we did. Coach believes in his players, and that’s successful. Coach demands a lot of them, but at the same time, the best players are going to earn his trust.
“When you get into those situations, he’s going to trust the players and trust what they see. He’s not going to flinch.”
As a result, the Chiefs have proved to have more answers than any other team.
They had answers when Brown and Rashee Rice got hurt, they found a solution at left tackle and they patched it together at corner—and they won and won and won.
“That’s what makes us so great,” Mahomes says, “is it’s not just one guy. It’s everybody.
“Never gets old,” he says, smiling broadly as he walks into a side room at Arrowhead Stadium.
He was, of course, talking about hoisting another trophy, with a shot at the big one forthcoming.
But he could’ve been talking about the formula Kansas City has found over the past seven years to keep returning to the big stage—proving Brady’s words prophetic.
They’ve all kept doing what they’re doing. And once again, after this year’s bumps, it sure looks like the Chiefs can’t be stopped.
More NFL on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tom Brady’s Advice to Patrick Mahomes Has Shaped This Year’s Chiefs.
