Patrick Mahomes was bad in Super Bowl LIX, but his teammates were worse 

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is the best quarterback in football right now. He could retire after this season and coast into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a first ballot induction. 

He is the foundation of the organization and the single biggest reason they have played in at least the AFC Championship game in every season that he has been a starting quarterback.

All of that is true.

It is also true that his performance in the Chiefs’ Super Bowl LIX loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was one of the worst single-game performances of his career. 

It was not necessarily his fault, either. 

Overall, Mahomes’ numbers do not look terrible. He threw for 257 yards, three touchdowns and had a passer rating of 95.7. Most quarterbacks would love to have that sort of a performance in the Super Bowl. It might even be the type of numbers that generally produce a win.

But those numbers are extraordinarily misleading. The majority of his yards, and all three of his touchdowns, came late in the game after the Eagles had already built up a 34-0 lead. Late in the fourth quarter it was a 40-6 game in the final seven minutes when the Chiefs finally started to stack up some yards and points against an Eagles defense that was playing softer coverages and already knew it had the game comfortably won. 

Throw out the final numbers and just focus on what actually happened on Sunday night.

While Mahomes threw three touchdowns, he also turned the ball over three times, including a dreadful pick-six to Cooper DeJean to put the Chiefs into a 17-0 hole, and an even worse interception just before halftime that helped make it a 24-0 game. 

They were bad decisions, worse throws, and just highlighted how off Mahomes and the Chiefs offense was from the very beginning of the game. 

The biggest reason they were off all night? They got manhandled by the Eagles defense. 

Mahomes was under pressure on more than half of his drop backs, was sacked six times and never seemed comfortable in the pocket. It was a shocking display given that the Eagles did not run a single blitz all night, and consistently relied on a four-man pass rush. 

On the rare occasion that Mahomes was able to get a throw off, the chemistry with his wide receivers seemed off, while they also struggled to make plays. That was obvious on a pass in the third quarter when Mahomes had a wide open DeAndre Hopkins in the middle of the field for what looked to be a big gain, only to have him drop the football.

The entire performance, from a team perspective, was very reminiscent of the Chiefs’ Super Bowl LV loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the 2020 season when Mahomes was constantly on the run playing behind a bad offensive line. This year’s Chiefs line was better than that group, but they were simply overmatched by a superior Eagles team.

The Chiefs’ wide receivers have been an issue for two years now, but they have been able to overcome it because of Mahomes’ magic.

A rare off night from Mahomes, and a bad matchup against a dominant Eagles defense, made it impossible for that recipe to work again on Sunday.

Mahomes was bad. The team around him was bad. It was the wrong night for all of that to happen for the Chiefs.