After a Bad Game in Seattle, Now's the Time to Panic About Patrick Mahomes, Right? Is That How This is Supposed to Work?
Let's try a thought experiment. Assume for a moment I don't know how the NFL works. Maybe I just moved here from a foreign country that only has futbol. Or I've beamed here from an alien planet to learn human customs. Or I'm an unfrozen caveman:
Giphy Images.… and I've only been observing your kind since the beginning of September. So I watched the Patriots play at Seattle in Week 1, and the Chiefs in Seattle last night. And I watched both quarterbacks struggle in that environment against that team. So I'd know exactly how to react to how bad Patrick Mahomes looked.
Which is pure, unadulterated panic. Assume he's washed. Declare that all his prior success was only due to him playing a MAC Conference schedule. And insist that the Seahawks had discovered the formula that reduces him to ashes. Just like you all did with Drake Maye six weeks earlier:
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Like the teenager caught smoking weed in a PSA, I learned it from yyyooouuu.
After all, Mahomes and Maye's Seattle stat lines were eerily similar:
Maye 9/9/26: 10 points scored. 22-of-33, 66.7 Comp %, 178 yards, 5.4 YPC, 1 TD, 3 INTs, 66.9 QBR, 54.9 Passer rating
Mahomes 10/25/26: 3 points scored. 19-of-33, 57.6 Comp %, 165 yards, 5.0 YPC, 0 TD, 1 INT, 60.5 QBR, 58.3 Passer rating
And if you want to pull back from Street View to Google Earth and look at the season so far, the similarities become even eerier:
And like those Seahawks games, Maye has been statistically better.
Which should mean that the zombie horde should be stumbling toward Mahomes to tear his limbs apart and devour his brains as we speak. Because that's how this is supposed to work, right? Especially when this makes two games in a row with no touchdowns and an interception?
Apparently not. I mean, just check out the passive tone of these posts. It's like Mahomes was a victim of circumstance. Or a innocent bystander. At the very least, a neutral observer.
From notorious Mahomes sycophant Collinsworth, of course. But not limited to him:
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… pressure rate in a game in his career, regular season or playoffs.
Even when he fumbled - and admittedly busted his ass to get the ball back - Mahomes is being hailed as a hero instead of the guy who turned the ball over because he had no awareness of the pressure coming from behind him:
So to repeat, your world confuses and frightens me. One quarterback plays a bad game and gets pilloried from coast to coast. The other plays a worse game, and he's barely responsible. Same opponent. Same defense. Same stadium. Same prime time audience. Just a month and a half apart. Proving once again that if the football world didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
The good news for Patriots fans is that Mahomes is 31 and by all appearances is looking at his career peak in the rearview. Where Maye is 24, continues to get better, and has a long career still ahead of him. Even if he'll never achieve Mahomes' levels of getting glazed by the nation media, he can always have more success.