You can’t win against Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. I know you THINK you can. I know you saw all those graphics about the Chiefs stringing together one-score win after one-score win and said to yourself, Well, that’s not analytically sustainable, right before they made your team their next victim. I know that the Bills, who spent the entirety of last night’s AFC title game playing like the proverbial dog on the porch who’s tired of getting kicked, could have won that game had just one thing gone differently. Slide a door and there isn’t a game-breaking disagreement between opposing side judges on Josh Allen’s failed fourth-down attempt. Slide another and Xavier Worthy doesn’t Fail Mary his way to the 3-yard line toward the close of the first half. Slide another and the Bills don’t call a piddly shit bubble screen on third-and-10 on their final drive. To lose to the Chiefs is to be trapped in a room of nothing but sliding doors, all of them bolted shut.
It’s enough to drive you mad, and that madness will be on full display today and forever. It will manifest itself on sports talk radio, and on television, and on the internet. The Bills were just an inch away from beating the Chiefs, you swear. It’s a lie that’s equal parts comforting and enraging. Buffalo should have won that game, you’ll tell everyone. But nefarious external forces—the refs, the league office, Big Government—deliberately fixed the outcome in Kansas City’s favor. It’s not just. It’s not even real. Fetch me my bag of asterisks. All my life, this has been the preferred defense mechanism for all sports fans in the face of greatness. This is because it feels better to deny greatness—to believe what can’t be defeated can be—than to accept your team’s powerlessness against it.
But you and I are powerless against Mahomes and the Chiefs, just as the Eagles will be two weeks hence. They’re so talented, so well-organized, and so smart that they have the rest of the world seeing black magic where there's none to be found. The Chiefs never let you forget your mistakes. In fact, they’ll capitalize on them to such a degree that every bad decision you make against them will look like the worst decision that anyone has ever made. Every call that goes in their favor feels predetermined specifically because they know how to inflict maximum pain in the wake of it. That Worthy double catch? The Chiefs scored a touchdown three plays later. That controversial stoning of Allen, the would-be Niagran Nightmare, on fourth down? The Chiefs scored a touchdown five plays later. Every time you fuck up against the Chiefs, even if you swear it’s not your fault, you pay. It’s so automatic as to feel like sorcery.
This is how greatness works. Greatness does its homework. Greatness pressures opponents into making mistakes because those opponents are already certain that greatness will make none of its own. And greatness has no sympathy for what you and I think should have happened. Greatness locks every door behind it and ignores your every cry from the other side. When greatness persists, it takes on a sheen of ordinariness that fosters ennui—and naturally, resentment—among those who witness it. It happened when Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls. It happened when the Jordan Bulls turned the New York Knicks into their annual springtime whipping boy. It happened when Tiger Woods bent every major field to his will before he’d even teed off.
And it’s happening now. Patrick Mahomes is 29 years old. He has not thrown an interception since before Thanksgiving. He has gone to the AFC title game every year he’s been a starter: seven and counting. He’s the MVP of the league every year, even when he isn’t formally awarded the honor. He already has three Lombardi Trophies, and he can easily double (triple?) that amount in the coming years. I wish I could tell you that this is just a case of Fate being mean, but that would be a cheap act of denial. I’d be denying that Kansas City officially won all of these games, and will never un-win them. I’d also be denying the fact that, as long as the Chiefs’ championship window is open, every other team’s is closed. Mine included.
More important, I’d be denying that a real live human being (and Patrick Mahomes, despite he and his family's glaring anti-charisma, very much is one) can do things that scan as both physically and emotionally inhuman. How does Mahomes always know where everyone on the field is, and where they’ll be two seconds from now? Why do his screen passes always go for a zillion yards and your team’s get snuffed out right at the catch point? How is he is able to bust out a long run while looking like he’s scurrying into a rest stop bathroom? How come he always manages to have the ball last, every game?
There are terrestrial answers to all of these questions, most of them rooted in a marriage of supreme ability and flawless preparation. Predictable answers. Boring answers. As Brian Phillips once wrote of Peyton Manning, “This is how he plays football: He goes out every week with a graphing calculator and a stack of forms, and he just audits teams to death.” No one wants to root for an accountant. More important, no one wants to be defeated by one. But at this level of sport, greatness is in the accounting. Every line item, every dollar, every last detail … it’s all been noted and addressed. If you can’t see that, it’s because you don’t want to. Patrick Mahomes will force you to see it eventually. Curses aren’t real. But he is, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
