ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs MELLINGER - Patrick Mahomes and the challenge ahead for the Kansas City Chiefs

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The cameras didn’t catch the thoughtfulness. The story is worth telling right here at the top. Patrick Mahomes, the 23-year-old lightning bolt who has changed everything for the Chiefs, threw the football 50 yards and perfectly placed with not much more than the flick of his right wrist.

Touchdown, of course.

Mahomes raised his hands to the sky. He saw Tyreek Hill dancing in the end zone, and knew immediately what needed to be done. He ran 85 yards in a straight line, deviating only for a couple leaping high-fives with teammates. Hill had put the ball down to dance. Mahomes scooped it, ran to the sideline and handed it to a staff member.

“Hey, keep this for Ty,” he said. “This is his record ball.” :deevee:

The Chiefs beat the Raiders 35-3 at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday, clinching the AFC West and the conference’s top seed. They will play at home, and likely as the betting favorite, until and unless they make it to the franchise’s first Super Bowl in 49 years.

A thousand reasons exist for why this Chiefs team — haunted as fans might be by playoff failures past — presents the franchise’s best chance at a Super Bowl in more than two decades.

Some of them revolve around the AFC lacking a great opponent. The league’s best three teams might be in the NFC. But most of the reasons revolve around the quarterback and can be seen in fairly obvious ways.

The Chiefs led 21-3 at halftime, for instance. They led by that score 51 weeks ago in this building and fell flat on their faces in a collapse against the Titans in the playoffs. This time, they broke it open on a third and 10 from their own 11, when Mahomes came up in the pocket against pressure and threw off his right foot 50 yards downfield to Demarcus Robinson for a touchdown.

The Chiefs have broken hearts so many times before. The last time they had the No. 1 seed, Elvis Grbac happened. The last time they had a first-round bye, they lost without giving up a touchdown. But those teams — and every other soul sucker, from The Kicker to Forward Progress — employed limited quarterbacks.

This one employs a transcendent talent, the probable MVP of the league.

“It’s a different feeling,” said right tackle Mitchell Schwartz. “With the quarterback we have and the receivers we have, it’s not like, ‘Oh man, it’s third and 10, it’s going to be incomplete and we’ll get off the field.’ It feels like we’ve converted a not normal amount of those long third downs, and sometimes in spectacular fashion, which fires everybody up.”

But Mahomes is more than a curly-haired highlight generator. His passer rating is over 100 in virtually every situation imaginable: when blitzed, and not blitzed; inside the pocket and out. Talk to his teammates and they’ll marvel at his intelligence and diligence.

The coach-speak for this is “he doesn’t make the same mistake twice.” Chiefs coach Andy Reid has repeated this one since training camp. You can see it in real time, too, like on the first possession when he recognized the blitz on third and long, made the first guy miss, and made the smart read to fullback Anthony Sherman for a conversion.

That extended the drive, which led to the long touchdown to Hill, which led to Mahomes remembering — in that moment, with 70,000 fans cheering his perfect pass — that Hill had just broken the franchise record for receiving yards in a season.

Which led to him running down the field, picking up the ball and handing it to a staffer. He created that moment, and squeezed every drop from it, right down to a keepsake for his friend.

“The guy’s got a swagger about him that’s infectious,” center Mitch Morse said.

Now comes the hard part. The important part. The only part that matters, really. This season is strange, with definitions slippery. The organization viewed this initially as a transition year, as time for the defense to acquire enough talent and Mahomes enough experience to be a Super Bowl contender after that.

But Mahomes skipped six steps of development, so here we are in a place where a first-year starting quarterback is leading one of the NFL’s most underperforming franchises when it comes to the playoffs, and anything less than a Super Bowl appearance will be a disappointment.

Life moves fast, you know?

“That’s old news,” linebacker Justin Houston said. “You don’t focus on the past. Don’t let the past poison your future.”

The locker room was pretty subdued. Happy, of course. They hugged. They high-fived. They congratulated. They wore hats that commented them as AFC West champion. But this was not a party. They’ve had wilder locker rooms after regular-season wins this year — against the Steelers, Broncos, maybe the Ravens.

In the moments after the players gathered, and before the media was allowed in, Houston told anyone within reach of his booming bass voice that this would not mean anything if they didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. He meant a Super Bowl.

Tight end Travis Kelce said the same thing to reporters, referencing past disappointments when he said, “We’ve been in this situation before, and we’ve learned from it.”

“Honestly this means a lot,” running back Damien Williams said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a hat.”

The work of turning that hat into a trophy begins now. If you look at their past, you would want to go fetal ROFLROFLROFL and protect all vital organs. If you look at their quarterback, you would make plans to be in Atlanta.

The truth is one extreme or the other, likely to be decided in a blink, when the quarterback who’s better faster than anyone expected is asked to do it one more crucial time.

In that moment, do you know? Will you believe?