Patrick Mahomes took the floor in the Kansas City Chiefs’ team meeting Saturday night, for once, at a total loss for words.
“I mean, how do I follow ” he said to the room.
He wasn’t the only one there left speechless.
The longest-tenured Chief, Travis Kelce had a season that was a lot more than just the fact that he’s dating one of the world’s most famous people. He’s been hurt. He’s shown age. His numbers were down, and, at 34, real questions about how much longer he’d play were asked. And yet, in the playoffs, when it mattered most, he was able to harness what he needed.
In so many ways, too, his fight this year was the Chiefs’ fight. They went through a 3–5 stretch that generated a lot of doubt on the outside. Tyreek Hill had been gone for over a year. Kelce wasn’t the same. The team would need to reshape its identity.
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Kelce’s speech wouldn’t go blow-by-blow through all of it. But when he, Chris Jones and Mahomes were called to talk to the team by coach Andy Reid, with Jones and Mahomes sandwiching Kelce’s talk with teammates, the nine-time Pro Bowl QB knew what he had to do—lean into who he and his team had become over the last six months, a different version, to be sure, of championship Chiefs, with a title-winning mettle that’d only been strengthened.
“I think it was more of a passionate rah-rah than something sad,” Kelce said, in a quiet moment outside the locker room postgame. “I just told everybody, ’. I ate a little bit of my words, knowing that [the Niners] had a lot more in them than I even imagined. But I was still right, baby. Chiefs got the formula. We knew what we had in this locker room, and we took it from there.”
What they have is the greatest quarterback on the planet, two guys alongside that’ll also go into Canton and then a lot of youth—and a lot more toughness than most people realized.
Kansas City’s 25–22 Super Bowl win over the San Francisco 49ers was a lot of things. It just wasn’t the work of art that the first Chiefs team to beat San Francisco on this stage had been so accustomed to painting. These Chiefs are decidedly different than those were. They’re more reliant on their defense. They’re not afraid to lean on punishing tailback Isiah Pacecho. They don’t have the horsepower they did when Mahomes was just settling in as starter.
But one thing they do have that’s similar to what those Chiefs had is a Lombardi Trophy, after a scintillating chess match of a Super Bowl in the shadow of the strip in Las Vegas. And now, with three of those in five years, they’ve got a dynasty, too.
