Patrick Mahomes’ brilliant talent has also made him a target

Patrick Mahomes might just be the best thing to ever come along for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. The past four years have been historically great. They’ve had four straight AFC Championship Game appearances. They’ve made it to two Super Bowls and won one of them, the first championship in 50 years.

They have been the most consistently good team in the NFL over those four seasons and have become a fixture in conversations about the NFL on the national level. As Chiefs fans, we’ve been waiting for a player like this for most of our lives. For the most part, it’s been everything we could have ever dreamed of.

The one downside (if you can even call it that) is that the Chiefs are no longer the lovable Midwestern underdog who everyone is happy to see succeed. Instead, they have quickly risen to the top of the NFL’s teams that people are “tired of winning” and Patrick Mahomes has now become a player that many want to see fail.

At the NFL Honors award show, there was Keegan-Michael Key’s joke about how he saw Joe Burrow‘s outfit and forgot how to play football in the second half. There were the endless talking heads declaring Joe Burrow the new best young quarterback in the NFL because the Cincinnati Bengals beat Mahomes and the Chiefs this season, despite the fact that nothing on Burrow’s actual resume can match Mahomes yet.

Just this past week Sam Acho went on television and said Mahomes wasn’t in his top five quarterbacks in the NFL. Why is this happening? Simple, because everyone actually knows that Mahomes is amazing, but nobody wants to keep hearing that over and over and over every year. That doesn’t get clicks. That doesn’t generate views. You can’t just talk about how Mahomes is still the best all offseason long. So instead you try to prop someone new up.

You come up with a “hot take” that can be the buzz of social media for 24 hours. This week we got a report that Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy was the primary reason for K.C.’s failures this week. Not only was he not listening to Mahomes enough, but he was flat out fighting with him.

It doesn’t stop there, and sadly that’s not even the worst garbage Mahomes has had to deal with this week. Over the past year, there has been growing animosity towards Mahomes fiancé Brittany Matthews and his brother Jackson. That all came to a head this week with two separate incidents. The first was when cameras at the Texas Tech basketball game caught Mahomes and Matthews in what looked like a bit of a disagreement, something that happens with literally every couple that has ever been in a serious relationship. The second is when it was falsely reported that Mahomes had asked both Matthews and his brother to stay away from Chiefs games next season. Mahomes’ response was pretty much perfect.

I think there are actually two separate things at play here. First, there is the national angle where people are basically able to attack Mahomes without having to deny his talent and success on the field. The second is K.C. fans who like to pin any struggles that Mahomes has on the “distractions” of his family as opposed to just accepting that he is still human and is going to make mistakes sometimes.

Unfortunately for Patrick Mahomes, he is too talented to escape this spotlight. Early odds have the Chiefs as frontrunners for the Super Bowl again next season, so as long as he continues to play quarterback at the level he has for the past four seasons, there are going to continue to be opposing fans who cast stones at him.

Mahomes is going to be one of the favorite targets for TV’s talking heads for whom new “hot takes” will emerge to create buzz for their own shows. So far, Patrick Mahomes is the best thing to happen to the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s not perfect. He has room to continue to improve and grow.