NEW ORLEANS -- When a coach realizes his quarterback could be the greatest of all time, it should be a feeling of pure joy, right?
Not in the case of the Kansas City Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes.
"It makes it so much more stressful," Chiefs passing game coordinator Joe Bleymaier told ESPN on Wednesday of Super Bowl week. "You feel the burden as a coach and as you're putting a game plan together to not waste his abilities. To not go through a season where you don't give him the opportunity. To not screw it up as the coaching staff. So rather than feeling like this just unbridled excitement that we could do anything, it's actually more like a terror, like we cannot be the reason that we screwed this guy up or this team up."
Every week when Bleymaier puts together the game plan with coach Andy Reid, offensive coordinator Matt Nagy and the Chiefs staff, he wonders, "Are we utilizing him the best? Are we giving him the stuff that he needs? It's just constantly second-guessing ourselves just so that he has everything he needs to go be himself."
That burden weighed heavily on many of the Chiefs' players after a 40-22 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in the silent and stuffy Super Bowl LIX postgame locker room Sunday night. Mahomes, who threw a pick-six in the first half, told the players at halftime that he needed to play better, according to Leo Chenal. The linebacker said he could hear in Mahomes' voice how much he was hurting by not playing up to his own standard.
"He demanded better of himself. And guys all around him were like, 'We need to be better for you, too, Patrick,'" Chenal said.
But the motivation of supporting a dynasty-building quarterback wasn't enough to overcome a 24-0 first-half deficit. The Chiefs fell short of making NFL history with a third straight title and wallowed in the shock of it.
Receiver DeAndre Hopkins slouched with his eyes closed as he rode down the concourse in a golf cart. Tight end Travis Kelce spoke to reporters for a quick two minutes before turning his back. Receivers JuJu Smith-Schuster and Hollywood Brown sat facing their lockers with their heads bowed, their upper bodies fully bent in half. Offensive lineman Joe Thuney wiped blood off his right calf.
As soon as Mahomes said it out loud last season after the Chiefs' second consecutive Super Bowl win -- "No one's ever got three. I want to go back-to-back-to-back," the NFL Films crew caught him saying to Chris Jones -- a three-peat seemed inevitable. But even the greatest quarterback can be rendered powerless when under siege by the league's deepest pass rush.
Kansas City's offensive line had held together until the most important game, when it faced the opponent whose roster is built around offensive and defensive line play. Thuney, one of the best guards in football, had filled in nobly at left tackle since Week 15, playing the role because Kansas City's younger tackles needed more time to develop. When Reid suggested moving the All-Pro left guard over to left tackle, offensive line coach Andy Heck wasn't sold on the idea. They'd be sacrificing on the interior and asking Thuney to do a very different job, out in space battling the best edge rushers.
Reid's solution was another example of the Chiefs' in-season problem solving, and it was enough to get them to the Super Bowl. But the Eagles' defensive line made it clear that this was not a permanent solution, and the entire offensive line struggled to protect Mahomes. The Eagles' defense never blitzed Mahomes but still generated six sacks for a loss of 31 yards and forced Mahomes into two uncharacteristic interceptions and a fumble.
"In order to make a team blitz, you have to be able to beat what they're showing. And that's what we didn't do," Mahomes said.
Mahomes' 11.4 Total QBR is the second lowest in a Super Bowl since ESPN introduced the metric in 2006. The Chiefs trailed 34-0 in the third quarter, which is their largest deficit in any game since Mahomes became the starting quarterback in 2018.
Mahomes and Kelce missed on connections twice in the first half, and Kelce didn't get a catch until the end of the third quarter.
The Eagles won so decisively that they doused coach Nick Sirianni in Gatorade with 2:52 left in the game. After the Eagles recovered the Chiefs' last-ditch onside kick attempt, Mahomes walked the length of the Chiefs' bench, shaking hands with teammates. He hugged Kelce longer than the rest.
CHIEFS COACHES SAID Mahomes never talked about the three-peat in a team setting, but away from the Chiefs facility, in sessions with his personal trainer, Bobby Stroupe, Mahomes did voice the prospect of a three-peat multiple times. "I get to hear unfiltered Patrick every Monday," Stroupe said during Super Bowl week.
Stroupe has trained Mahomes since the quarterback was 10 years old, and typically Stroupe plays the role of the antagonizer. Remember Burrowhead. Don't forget how the Bengals made you feel.
"Whatever is getting to him, that's what I'm going to talk about when the workout is tough," Stroupe said.
Like the time during the 2022 postseason, before the Chiefs won their first of back-to-back titles, when Mahomes had a severe high ankle sprain and Stroupe said the quarterback was in excruciating pain and close to throwing up while he had him farmer-carry a 400-pound hex weight bar.
But that negative bulletin-board material felt "old hat" this year, Stroupe said. "Whatever the latest Bengal is saying, we're just kind of over it. But you've got to grip something."
So Mahomes gripped something weightier and more solid than a flimsy insult. Stroupe said Mahomes started talking about his goal of winning three straight during OTAs this past offseason. And specifically the idea of the three-peat as a legacy.
"Everybody wants to win a Super Bowl when they get to it," Stroupe said last week. "But this one, this means something, and it means something that for him is better than anything individual. I think he wants more than anything for this team to be known as the best team of all time.
"When I'm whooping his ass, that's the thing he's been going to. This year, it shifted pretty quick to 'We got a chance of legacy here with this team.'"
Stroupe said Mahomes told him at one of his last workouts during the bye week before the Super Bowl that because no other NFL team had completed a three-peat, doing so would put the Chiefs on a higher tier of dynasty.
In past years, Stroupe finished a workout with Mahomes by reminding him to stay open-minded to the result, with the goal of playing his best football. Not this year.
"For him to bring [the three-peat] up, it's just really uncommon for him," Stroupe said. "It was just a different response."
CONSTANT CHANGE IS is the main reason quarterbacks struggle in the NFL. And that's why the Chiefs dynasty is under no threat. The consistency of Kansas City's coaching staff during Mahomes' career has helped him become an NFL parity-buster, despite falling short Sunday night.
Since Mahomes became the Chiefs' starter in 2018, Kansas City has 23 more wins than any other team (postseason included), the highest points per game (28.0) and the most yards per game (386.1).
The Chiefs have the best seven-season run (.781 winning percentage, 107-30 record, including the postseason) in the modern era (since 1966), better than any seven-season stretch of the Patriots' dynasty. As highlighted by Peter King, Mahomes' pre-age-30 playoff stats are better than Brady's -- by a lot. Mahomes has thrown 26 more touchdown passes and won two more conference titles with a passer rating almost 20 points higher.
"We all have a fixed set of resources, draft picks, cap room, and we get to decide how to play with it," Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said last week. "That's what makes this really fun as a GM, that you really get to choose the direction that you want your team to go in.
"You talk about the Chiefs, and you're talking about maybe the greatest coach of all time, with an unbelievable Hall of Fame quarterback, so it's pretty easy to see why they're in this position year after year, and we're striving to be a team like that that plays like them. Playing for a three-peat is unbelievable."
Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said last week that Reid, who signed an extension last offseason, will be back next season. Mahomes is under contract through 2031 on a rare 10-year deal that provides Chiefs general manager Brett Veach a long runway. Most NFL general managers can't rely on their starting quarterback remaining in place for seven more seasons. Mahomes' contract length and the rare security it provides to both sides allows him to be part of roster management conversations.
Milton Williams gets to Patrick Mahomes, who takes his sixth sack of the night and fumbles, giving Philadelphia the ball back in the fourth quarter.
"When you have a young franchise quarterback, you open a window to have success for an extended period of time," Hunt said. "And we knew we had that back in 2020 and Patrick was [25] years old at the time. ... And so then the exercise became, how do we keep building the team around Patrick? Because we know he's going to be here for a while, and that's going to give us a chance to win every year."
ESPN analyst Troy Aikman fell short of three-peating as the Cowboys' starting quarterback. "I've always been asked a lot about why is it that we have so few teams repeated? It's hard to win, it's hard to win one Super Bowl. It's hard to win a Super Bowl and then to have it all come into alignment again."
"I was proud of how my team fought this entire season with the expectations that we had on us," Mahomes said postgame. "But we did, we came up short."
Aikman, like Mahomes, won three Super Bowls before age 30. But unlike Mahomes, Aikman's head coach left after their second Super Bowl win, and the Cowboys lost in the NFC Championship Game the next year. "There's a lot that can derail a franchise," Aikman said during Super Bowl week. "He's still got the staff."
Kelce's NFL future is uncertain, but Mahomes pointed out Sunday that Kansas City has a young nucleus with many players who have never lost in the postseason until this Super Bowl. Like Chenal, who was experiencing something entirely unfamiliar.
"I'm struggling to even process it," Chenal said. "I'm just thinking about getting back with my family and just hugging them."
"It's going to hurt for a while, but how can you respond from it?" Mahomes said. "... And how can you get better? How can you not be satisfied with just getting here and taking your game to the next level?"
TOM BRADY, THE quarterback to whom Mahomes is compared most, told Fox Sports Radio's Colin Cowherd during Super Bowl week that because he won championships early in his career, he didn't realize how difficult it was until he went 10 years without winning one. He said a Super Bowl loss on the résumé "matters more than any other loss that you will ever be a part of."
Mahomes figures to dwell on this one, too. It's in his makeup. His dad, Pat Mahomes Sr., has seen it since he began watching his son compete at age 4.
"I've been around professional athletes since I was 17 years old," the former Major League Baseball pitcher told ESPN last week. "And I played forever. And I really have never seen a person that's that dedicated to not lose."
Brady said when he goes to Philadelphia, fans yell at him about the "Philly Special" trick play deployed by the Eagles to help beat Brady's Patriots in Super Bowl LII. He said that when he was at a Knicks game with his son, Brady threw a ball to Spike Lee, who caught it against his head like David Tyree's helmet catch, an iconic moment in the Giants' defeat of New England in Super Bowl XLII.
"That was 17 years ago and I am still living that thing down," Brady said. "No one remembers the loss I had to Peyton [Manning] in the 2015 [AFC] Championship Game.
"They all tell me about the losses in the Super Bowl, though. So I think the challenging thing, if you look at Patrick, you want to win this game if you are Patrick because if you don't you are 3-2 in Super Bowls and it is not a great feeling. So there is a lot of pressure from my standpoint as I got older and I realized the enormity of this game and how important it is to actually win this game."
Mahomes has learned that lesson.
"These will be the two losses that will motivate me to be even better the rest of my career, because you only get so few of these, and you have to capitalize on these," he told reporters postgame. "They hurt probably more than the wins feel good."
Mahomes' two Super Bowl losses weren't defined by a signature play like some of Brady's defeats were. But now there's 34-0, the Eagles' largest lead in Sunday's game, when there was talk of the first Super Bowl shutout.
Stroupe has already seen Mahomes use three prior losses -- two AFC title games and one Super Bowl -- to become the first quarterback to lead a team to three consecutive Super Bowls.
"Those losses changed him," Stroupe said. After other seasons, Mahomes took a full two weeks off before getting back to training, but after the loss to the Bengals in the 2021 AFC Championship Game, Stroupe said Mahomes was back in the gym a week later. That was as long as he could bear to stay away.
This time will be even more amplified. Stroupe knows he'll be lucky to get a week off.