2024 Super Bowl Tip Sheet: Patrick Mahomes’s Athletic Ability Is ‘Kind of Annoying, Actually’
Whether it’s baseball, basketball, golf or soccer, the Chiefs quarterback excels at everything. Plus, the NFL’s turf war, Justin Jefferson’s contract, C.J. Stroud’s defense of Bryce Young and more.
• One of Patrick Mahomes’s coaches heard my question and laughed.
“He’s gonna see it, see what you write,” he says, “and whatever it is, he’ll come back next year and be better than everyone else at it.”
So over the past two days, that was a task I took on, trying to find something—a sport, a game, anything—that the two-time Super Bowl champion quarterback is not good at.
Mission unaccomplished.
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Is there anything Mahomes stinks at?
“Um, let me think,” says Kansas City Chiefs director of player personnel Tim Terry, before breaking into a laugh. “No.”
“No,” affirmed assistant GM Mike Borgonzi.
At this Super Bowl in Las Vegas, as was the case at his previous three, Mahomes has been asked about his multi-sport background. He excelled at baseball just like his dad—he once threw a 16-strikeout, no-hitter in high school, was drafted by the Detroit Tigers and played as a freshman at Texas Tech. He was so good that a lot of college football coaches didn’t recruit him on the assumption that he’d follow in his dad’s footsteps. As a senior at Whitehouse High in East Texas, he was a league MVP and all-district player in basketball.
“He’ll show you his basketball highlights,” kicker Harrison Butker says.
It hardly stops there.
"He’s kind of good at everything, golf, basketball,” safety Justin Reid says. “I watched his high school tape of him playing safety, so maybe tackling is something he could work on. That’s not anything that he does anymore. Anything he puts his mind to, he can go out and do it. He can market. He can talk well. He holds himself to a high standard, and he’s competitive as hell with everything that he does.”
Reid then added, “It’s kind of annoying, actually.”
Butker was sitting with Mahomes’s backup, Blaine Gabbert, as he thought about my question, and they started and they landed on a new Friday staple at the Chiefs facility.
“He’s pretty good at soccer,” Butker says. “Y’all played a little on Fridays."
“We play soccer on Fridays,” Gabbert says. “I think we’ve gotten better throughout the year at soccer. We still can’t kick a soccer ball like you guys can.”
“He can probably work on his headers a little bit,” Butker says.
“Headers are tough because you have to get your face in the way,” Gabbert says. “Golf game’s always a work in progress. There’s just not enough time."
Even so, for a guy who’s relatively new at golf, how Mahomes’s game is trending is, according to another Chiefs staffer, “ridiculous.”
But back to soccer. Butker, who won three Georgia state titles in the sport, respects Mahomes’s progress. But soccer is the one thing he said he thinks he can beat the quarterback at. That, he continued, and maybe “a juggling contest.”
Then, Butker said, there’s the fallout when he does lose.
“He gets upset about everything if he loses,” the kicker says, laughing. “I think that’s what makes him so great."
Which is something all of them can agree on.
“The dude is weird, man,” guard Trey Smith says, laughing. “It’s anything competitive I’ve seen him do, he’s gonna play at the highest level, and it’s not just, Oh, I’m O.K. It’s, I’m gonna try to win, I’m gonna try to whoop you. Especially sports—and competition—wise, I haven’t seen Pat be bad at anything, really. Video games, all that. … Anything that has a competitive nature to it, sports-wise, he’s gonna ball out. It’s unfair.”
“I have yet to find something that Pat’s not good at,” center Creed Humphrey says. “He’s one of those guys that, anything he tries, he’s going to be good at it. If he’s not good at it, he’s going to make sure he gets good at it. But, no, I haven’t found anything he’s not good at yet."
With my search running dry, I had a couple of the guys offer up some advice—to reach out to Gehrig Dieter, who came up with Mahomes in Kansas City over his five seasons (2017 to ’21) as a Chief. And one of the players said Dieter could keep up with Mahomes, which would make him an authority at answering our question.
I texted with him Thursday afternoon.
“Haha, he is good at everything,” Dieter concedes, via text. “But I’d smoke him on the pickleball court.”
If all the people around Mahomes are right, he’ll see that Dieter said that.
And you know the rest.
• San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan voiced his displeasure with the handling of the situation with the UNLV practice fields Wednesday, telling reporters, “I wish things were better.” But it does sound like, for the most part, the players have moved on, mostly because they don’t have much of a choice. The 49ers are keeping their schedule, rather than moving everything around to use the Las Vegas Raiders’ practice facility, where the Chiefs are located.
“It’s really not bad,” says all-world DE Nick Bosa, one of the league’s more militant players when it comes to fighting over playing surfaces. “It’s kind of like turf, though. It kind of feels like turf. And I don’t love turf. But it’s not bad. It’s not like it’s dangerous or anything.”
So ideal? No. Playable, as Roger Goodell said it was Monday? Sure.
But, of course, that the 49ers can simply function out there doesn’t change the fact that this is another eyesore in the league’s history of struggling to get this particular thing right for its players. And, it carries over to the larger grass vs. turf war.
“I mean, I’ll always be a proponent of grass,” Bosa says. “I think that should be a given.”
• The turf war also surfaced Wednesday, and repeatedly, during the NFLPA’s annual press briefing. And while new NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell’s approach appears a bit more conciliatory than that of his predecessor, DeMaurice Smith, he didn’t hesitate at, or miss, the chance to hit Goodell and the league office between the eyes.
For years, the league has told anyone who would listen that there are a lot of players who don’t agree with those that are vocal about their desire to play on natural grass over turf. To put that to the test, Howell led the charge as the NFLPA polled its whole membership on which surface it preferred to play. And the results left an easy undeniable conclusion—92% of 1,700 respondents voting that they’d most want to play on high quality grass.
Also, Howell and the player group with him said it was pretty hit-or-miss on owners conceding that laying down turf is a decision driven by business rather than what’s best for the players or the game. Which is to say, some of them seem to have taken the approach where if you say something enough, eventually, you start to believe it.
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• Having Eric Bieniemy back in the building is a good story for the Chiefs. It also could be of real value, and it’s something teams have done in the past. In 2011, the New England Patriots brought back fired Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels for the playoffs, and he returned full-time to the staff after the Super Bowl, with then-OC Bill O’Brien off to Penn State. Bieniemy, of course, could do the same, though there’s not a natural opening for him like there was for McDaniels.
• The Patriots’ front-office structure was in the news Wednesday. So I figured this would be a good place to flesh all of it out. Eliot Wolf is indeed the top decision-maker—for the time being at least—on the personnel side. Matt Groh is overseeing college scouting, Pat Stewart is in charge of pro scouting and there’s a lot of crossover and collaboration between those three.
And interestingly enough, the team’s offensive coordinator interviews, sources say, were conducted by a group of four—coach Jerod Mayo, Wolf, Groh and executive vice president of football business Robyn Glaser. The team took recommendations from the league on assembling that diverse panel.
• Chad Alexander was a good-sense hire as assistant GM by new Los Angeles Chargers GM Joe Hortiz. Alexander worked for years in Baltimore with Hortiz, and has five years of experience at the director level with the New York Jets. Maybe the more interesting addition, though, was Hortiz bringing aboard Corey Krawiec from the Baltimore Ravens as the director of player personnel strategy.
Krawiec worked the last 11 seasons in the Ravens’ analytics department—and Baltimore’s long been one of the more progressive franchises in the NFL, with their own proprietary systems built in-house. It’s also worth noting that while Jim Harbaugh is decidedly old school between the lines, he did work with an organization that was just like that in San Francisco.
• The Carolina Panthers hanging on to defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero, who last year signed a contract at $3.2 million per year, for Dave Canales’s first season is a massive win. Evero remained under contract after last year, but things easily could’ve gone sideways with a new staff.
• The Justin Jefferson rumblings from radio row are interesting for sure. But it’s still early February. And these things often look this way early on. The Minnesota Vikings have time to work things out with their superstar receiver.
• Kudos to C.J. Stroud for pointing out that his draft classmate, Bryce Young, was dealing with things “out of his control” in Carolina last year. It’s a nod to the oft-ignored fact that the fortunes of young quarterbacks, in general, are usually pretty connected to their circumstances.
• The Washington Commanders bringing in Brian Johnson to work on Kliff Kingsbury’s offensive staff is a smart move by coach Dan Quinn. The move supports the Doug Pederson theory of having a lot of quarterback guys among your coaches for a young guy at the position (assuming Washington winds up with one in April’s draft).