With the quarterback widely considered the greatest of all-time watching from the Fox broadcast booth Sunday, Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes had the opportunity to accomplish a feat not even Tom Brady could boast.
Instead, Mahomes and the Chiefs left New Orleans with their ambitions of a third consecutive Super Bowl title thwarted by Philadelphia in a 40-22 loss in Super Bowl 59.
The defeat pauses the debate that had surrounded the two-week lead-up to the game: Could Mahomes, at 29 years old and only eight years into his career, be on pace to surpass Brady as the NFL’s “GOAT” — greatest of all-time — quarterback?
Statistically, Mahomes entered holding the upper hand when compared to Brady after their eighth NFL season. Brady was watching in person from the broadcast booth as Mahomes attempted to close the game between them. After retiring following a career with seven Super Bowl titles, Brady was finishing his first year as an analyst for Fox.
Mahomes is now 3-2 in Super Bowls, with Brady 7-3 all-time. Both owned a 3-2 record after their first five Super Bowl appearances; over the same span, Brady threw for a combined nine touchdowns against two interceptions, with 10 touchdowns and seven interceptions for Mahomes.
“Anytime you lose a Super Bowl, it’s the worst feeling in the world,” Mahomes said. “It’ll stick with you the rest of your career. These will be the two losses that will motivate me to be even better the rest of my career.”
Mahomes is now 17-4 all-time in the postseason. His two interceptions tied a career-high in the playoffs and led to 14 points for Philadelphia.
“He’s a human being, man,” Chiefs receiver DeAndre Hopkins said. “And I guess the world got to see that.”
The loss did nothing to discount what put Mahomes in the conversation in the first place: his three Super Bowl titles, all after trailing by 10 points, and a Brady-like unflappability in clutch moments that saw him help Kansas City to win 17 consecutive one-score games. Kansas City had already made NFL history by advancing to a fifth Super Bowl in six years, and was attempting to match the Green Bay Packers — who won the last NFL championship in 1965, and the first two Super Bowls in 1966-67 — as league champions for three straight seasons.
But Sunday inside the Superdome in New Orleans, Mahomes appeared as vulnerable on a big stage as he had since the 2020 Super Bowl, coincidentally against Brady and Tampa Bay.
In that game, Tampa allowed Mahomes little time to process the defensive scheme and identify its holes for big gains, pressuring him on 16 of his 46 drop-backs on which Tampa used four pass-rushers, according to NFL data.
Four years later, Philadelphia followed a similar blueprint for success, sacking Mahomes a career-high six times. The Eagles recorded a “pressure” — a metric the league defines as any pass-rush play where the rusher affects the quarterback before the pass is thrown — on 38% of Mahomes’s pass attempts, despite never blitzing, according to the NFL’s NextGen Stats. The Eagles relied on zone coverage, which Mahomes often excels at picking apart, but under relentless pressure from Philadelphia, he never had the time Sunday.
Brady cemented his status as a consensus pick as the NFL’s greatest quarterback in 2017, when he led New England to a Super Bowl victory over Atlanta after trailing 28-3, the largest rally in the game’s history. Mahomes was unable to dig out of a deficit that reached 24-0 at halftime, when Mahomes had just 33 yards passing, and 34-0 late in the third quarter.
Mahomes “stayed positive the entire time, kept fighting, led by example, played his tail off every single snap this game,” Chiefs center Creed Humphrey said.
