ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs The Curse of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs

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There’s no shortage of ways to unpack the dominance of Patrick Mahomes with the Kansas City Chiefs.

At just 29 years old, he has already appeared in four Super Bowls and won three—including two straight. Since he became a starter, there hasn’t been a single season when the Chiefs failed to reach the AFC Championship Game. Along the way, he’s won a staggering 80% of his games.

But it turns out that the best way to understand Mahomes’s chokehold on the sport isn’t actually through his own successes. It’s through the shortcomings of every other quarterback since his reign over the sport began.

There’s now an entire generation of quarterbacks who have been starved of winning a Super Bowl—and it’s all because of him.

Mahomes’s sustained excellence—particularly in the postseason, where he has somehow managed to win a higher percentage of games than during the regular season—means there’s now more than a decade’s worth of superstar passers who have been completely shut out from hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. The likes of the Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson, the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jalen Hurts and the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen have all had their Super Bowl dreams crushed by the Chiefs. (For Allen, it’s almost an annual occurrence—he’s been on the losing side of a postgame embrace with Mahomes in the playoffs on three separate occasions.)

All of it has created a period of NFL pre-eminence unlike any other in the sport’s history. At this point, Mahomes is the only quarterback taken in the last 12 drafts to win a Super Bowl.

Put another way, any quarterback who had the misfortune of being born within six years of Mahomes is still patiently waiting for a first championship breakthrough.

“This is the greatest start of a career we’ve ever seen,” says ESPN analyst Alex Smith, who was the Chiefs starting quarterback when Mahomes was a rookie. “The rest of us, myself included, are thinking about, ‘What if I fail?’ That just doesn’t enter his mind.”

“He’s unaffected by the pressure,” Smith adds. “The pressure on these guys that have come up against him, it only mounts.”

Finding the last quarterback not named Mahomes to enter the league and actually finish a season covered in confetti requires a football time machine. Former Eagles quarterback Nick Foles, drafted in 2012, is the youngest at 35 years old—and he’s been out of the league for two seasons. Russell Wilson, selected that same year, was an up-and-coming star when he won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks 11 years ago. Now he’s 36 and a grizzled veteran.

Granted, Mahomes hasn’t won a championship in every season since he became a starter in 2018. But the players who have capitalized on his off years haven’t been his peers. They have been quarterbacks from an older generation: Matthew Stafford, then 34 years old, won his first for the Los Angeles Rams three years ago. Some guy named Tom Brady collected two more.

In fact, over Mahomes’s first three years, Brady was the only quarterback to beat Mahomes in the playoffs—and he did it twice. But even prime Brady didn’t trample his contemporaries quite like Mahomes. After all, the Patriots missed the playoffs entirely in his second season as a starter. That’s why the best comparisons might be in other sports.

Scores of NBA legends were held without an NBA Championship through the bad luck of being born around the same time as Michael Jordan. A generation of tennis stars struggled to win grand slams because of the game’s big three. The difference in this case is that Mahomes is like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic all rolled into one.

With a 15-3 postseason record, Mahomes has only lost to one quarterback besides Brady: the Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow, who went on to fall to Stafford’s Rams in the title game. The next season, the Chiefs got their revenge when they beat Cincinnati in the AFC Championship en route to another Super Bowl.

To Mahomes, the satisfaction of those wins is only magnified by his rare losses.

“Once you win the Super Bowl, even to another extreme, when you don’t win it, it sucks even more,” Mahomes said ahead of the season. “When you don’t win it now, it sucks because you know what it could be like.”

That attitude helps to explain why the list of quarterbacks whose seasons have been ended by Mahomes is so long. It includes No. 1 overall picks (Burrow, Baker Mayfield, Trevor Lawrence) and one Mr. Irrelevant (Brock Purdy). There are stars like Jackson, who led the Ravens to the No. 1 seed last year only to be taken down by the Chiefs in the AFC Championship, and journeymen like Jimmy Garoppolo, who endured his bout of Mahomes playoff misery in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl.

Some of those defeats have been so painful that they didn’t merely end the postseason hopes of Mahomes’s opposite number, but their entire NFL career. Former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck came up short against the Chiefs in Mahomes’s first postseason appearance—and never played in another NFL game.

Nobody has had their soul crushed quite like Allen, though. Three years ago in the divisional round, Buffalo lost to the Chiefs in overtime even when Allen threw a touchdown pass to give the Bills the lead with 13 seconds left. That’s when he learned that was 13 seconds too many for Mahomes, who miraculously got the team into position for a game-tying field goal before winning in overtime. Then last year, Kansas City squeaked past Buffalo by three points—Allen’s third playoff loss to Mahomes in as many tries.

It’s why Sunday’s high-profile Bills-Ravens showdown between Allen and Jackson is also a matchup of two quarterbacks who have never even reached the Super Bowl. And the prize for whoever comes out on top is likely another meeting with Mahomes, with the Chiefs heavily favored to advance past the Texans on Saturday.

The irony is that as haunted as these quarterbacks might be by their past January encounters with Mahomes, the Chiefs approach is to think about those games as little as possible. As they attempt to become the first team to three-peat in the Super Bowl era, their mindset has been to forget the past.

Or else it might distract them from their ultimate goal: beating all of those quarterbacks once again.

“When you look in the rearview mirror, then you normally get your tail kicked,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “You have to be careful of that.”