With Third Straight Super Bowl In Reach, Patrick Mahomes Doesn’t Care About Being The Villain

The public has grown tired of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, fulfilling the most boring, played-out media cycle in sports. In desperate need of a villain in the stories they create in their heads, fans are using Kansas City’s sustained success to transform the team from late-2010s darling to conniving, uninspired cheaters. 

“If winning football games makes you a villain, we’re going to keep going out there and doing it,” Mahomes said this week. “We embrace who we are. We believe we play the game the right way, with a lot of heart and passion for the game.”

We’ve seen this countless times in the modern sports landscape. It seems like too much attention inevitably leads to vitriol. The New York Yankees, never popular due to decades of success, didn’t adopt their “Evil Empire” moniker until 2002, right at the tail end of a four-title dynasty. The New England Patriots went from nobodies to a league-wide scourge when Tom Brady started racking up Super Bowls in the early 2000s. Teaming with Randy Moss in 2007 and Rob Gronkowski later on helped cement that status for another decade.

It comes up in works of fiction, too. WWE star John Cena, the company hero, walked out to raucous, overwhelming boos for most of his career as fans begged for a change in the world title picture. Harvey Dent, shortly before fulfilling his own prophecy in The Dark Knight, announced to Bruce Wayne, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

On the verge of a historic three-peat, this is where the Chiefs find themselves in the sporting world. More than going out of their way, many fans are practically doing inverted handstands trying to find ways to cheapen Kansas City’s accomplishments. 

The excuses are comprehensive. It’s rigged. The refs are biased. The Chiefs play soft. Mahomes isn’t as exciting anymore. The brand of football is unappealing and bad for the game. Taylor Swift shouldn’t be on my television screen. Andy Reid is carrying Mahomes. Mahomes is carrying Reid. The defense is carrying both of them.

Here are the facts: the Chiefs are a profoundly talented football team worthy of appearing in their third straight Super Bowl, and Mahomes is even more talented now than he was when anyone with a couch and some salsa was drooling over him in 2019. 

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It’s acceptable to root for someone else in the Super Bowl — Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley and the Eagles are just as deserving. It also feels unjust on some cosmic level that Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson have to spend another year watching from home. 

Kansas City is the Goliath, talented from every aspect with a resume of undeniable greatness. If fans need heroes, then the Chiefs can be their foil. Minimizing their accomplishments to do that, however, feels like a small and petty betrayal to the game itself. Without any organic rooting interest, spending a few hours hoping that supremely gifted individuals get exposed as frauds feels like time wasted.

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