Patrick Mahomes: what breaking down in 2025 tells us about who returns in 2026

Patrick Mahomes

Photo: U.S. Air National Guard Master Sgt. Michael Crane / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 17, 1995 Tyler
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Super Bowl ×3
Individual awards	National Football League Most Valuable Player Award · AP NFL Offensive Player of the Year Award · ESPY Awards

The thing about Patrick Mahomes is not the touchdowns or the Super Bowls or the contract worth more than half a billion dollars. It is the improvisational stubbornness, the refusal to accept that a play is over when any other quarterback would have already tucked the ball and slid. That quality has produced some of the most extraordinary moments in modern NFL history. It also put him on a surgeon’s table in December 2025, when a scramble late in a game against the Los Angeles Chargers ended with a torn ACL and LCL — and the Kansas City Chiefs missing the playoffs for the first time in a decade.

He grew up in Whitehouse, Texas, a small town east of Tyler, as the son of a professional baseball pitcher. Patrick Mahomes Sr. spent eleven seasons in the major leagues, and the rhythm of professional sport was not something Patrick II had to learn from a distance. By the time he reached Whitehouse High School, he was a three-sport athlete, drawing serious attention as a quarterback, a baseball pitcher, and a basketball player. The Detroit Tigers selected him in the 37th round of the 2014 MLB Draft. He chose football. Texas Tech offered the kind of pass-heavy system that matched his instincts, and in three college seasons he turned in numbers that read like science fiction, capping it with a 734-yard passing game against Oklahoma in 2016 that remains one of the most statistically extraordinary performances in college football history.

The Kansas City Chiefs took him 10th overall in the 2017 NFL Draft, then let him sit and watch Alex Smith run the offense for a full season. When Smith was traded to Washington in January 2018, Mahomes stepped into a franchise that had made one playoff appearance in the previous 22 years and turned it, almost immediately, into the most consistent winner in the AFC. In his first full season as starter, he threw 50 touchdown passes — matching Peyton Manning as only the second quarterback to throw 50 in a single season — and became the first Kansas City Chief ever to win the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award.

What followed was a level of sustained dominance the league had not seen outside of New England. Super Bowl LIV, a title against San Francisco that made him the youngest quarterback to win both a league MVP and a Super Bowl championship. A narrow Super Bowl LV loss the following year, played largely under duress against a Tampa Bay defense that pressured him on an NFL-record 29 of 56 dropbacks. A second MVP season in 2022 and a second Super Bowl in February 2023 — Super Bowl LVII against Philadelphia — during which he played through a re-aggravated ankle injury in the second half and still produced three touchdown drives. Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024, the first overtime championship game in Super Bowl history, a third title and a third MVP award that matched Joe Montana and sat only below Tom Brady’s five.

The easy reading of Mahomes is that he is the inevitable winner, the player whose talent so clearly exceeds his competition that outcomes are pre-determined. That reading ignores several things. The Super Bowl LV loss to Tampa Bay was decided largely by a defensive scheme the Chiefs had no answer for, not by Mahomes’ limitations. His 2023 regular season, statistically one of his weaker years, produced a team-record 15 wins and ended in a playoff run that papered over genuine offensive line problems and a thinning receiver corps. The three-peat attempt in Super Bowl LIX against Philadelphia — a 40-22 defeat — exposed something else: that the version of the Chiefs built around Mahomes could be stopped when the conditions were right, and that the margin between dynasty and decline is narrower than three Lombardi Trophies suggest.

The 2025 season made that clearer. Kansas City stumbled to a 6-11 record, the franchise’s worst under his tenure, and was eliminated from playoff contention before his injury made the ending feel retrospectively inevitable. There is something uncomfortable about a narrative that needed the physical evidence of a torn ligament to confirm what the standings already showed — that one rough season without the margin for error that championships provide looks different on the resumé. He had surgery the following morning. Nine months later, cleared to play, having restructured a contract that now runs through 2033 and pays him an average of $63 million per year — the NFL’s first deal worth over $500 million — he returned to training camp without an injury designation.

The question the contract cannot pre-answer is what version of Mahomes steps onto the field in Kansas City this season. The historical data on elite quarterbacks returning from ACL tears is cautiously optimistic — most recover their performance level within a year, a few exceed it — but the sample size behind a $504 million bet is smaller than the number implies. Head coach Andy Reid, who has called Mahomes the best quarterback he has been around in a career that spans five decades and two Super Bowl dynasties, and tight end Travis Kelce, who re-signed this offseason, have both expressed confidence in the return. The Chiefs added receivers in the draft to address the offensive roster that had thinned in 2025.

Mahomes married Brittany Matthews, and they have children together. He used his public position for voter-registration advocacy and spoke publicly in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, which contributed to Sports Illustrated naming him Sportsperson of the Year that season. His brother Jackson’s more conspicuous social media presence has occasionally drawn unwanted attention to the family; Mahomes has kept his own public image focused almost entirely on football.

The 2026 season will provide the clearest data on a question that no number of trophies has yet resolved: whether the player who never seemed to reach his ceiling can operate at the same level once he has seen what breaking down from the inside looks like. His previous encounters with adversity were a Super Bowl loss, a contract negotiation, a playoff run with an injured ankle. This is something different. A career that looked like a controlled experiment in winning now has an uncontrolled variable. That is what makes the next chapter worth reading.

Tags: sports, athletes, American football, NFL quarterbacks, Patrick Mahomes, super bowl, Kansas City Chiefs