Patrick Mahomes withstands greatest challenge of his career to win Super Bowl LIV

The 49ers had Patrick Mahomes right where they wanted him. And then they found out what the rest of the NFL already knows.

MIAMI — Before tonight, Patrick Mahomes had thrown two or more interceptions in an NFL game exactly three times: Against the Rams, Jaguars, and Patriots, all in the 2018 season. Before tonight, Patrick Mahomes had never thrown a postseason interception. Before tonight, to make Patrick Mahomes look mortal, you basically had to hope he’d leave the field. Before tonight, Patrick Mahomes had never faced a defense that had him bamboozed as the San Francisco 49ers’ defense did.

And yet, even with the 49ers up, 20-10 going into the second half of the fourth quarter, there wasn’t a single individual on the Chiefs’ sideline who didn’t believe their quarterback wouldn’t lead them to victory in Super Bowl LIV.

Because there is Patrick Mahomes and there is everybody else, and the 49ers learned that the hard way tonight. The Chiefs scored three touchdowns in a five-minute stretch in their usual whipsaw fashion, ending with Damien Williams’ 38-yard touchdown run with 1:12 left in the game, and that was the proverbial dagger in Kansas City’s 31-20 victory. It was the franchise’s first Super Bowl victory in 50 years. Mahomes, who finished the game with 26 completions in 42 attempts for 286 yards, two touchdowns, and two interceptions, became at age 24, the youngest Super Bowl MVP in the game’s history.

(Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports)

Give it to the 49ers’ ravenous-for-a-while defense, though — they did everything they could to beat Mahomes and his explosive offense into submission. They sacked Mahomes four times, created four tackles for loss, bombarded him with eight quarterback hits, and seemed to have him on their radar for a pressure on every snap. At the half, Mahomes had been restricted to throwing mostly short passes, he told me, because the 49ers’ pass rush made it that way. And hearing Mahomes say that a defense bent him to its will is a highly unusual event.

“That was just how the game turned out,” he said. “Those guys were getting upfield — obviously that’s a lot of great defensive linemen, and they were covering downfield. So, we hit some short stuff, and when I saw their safeties coming up [in the box], we tried to take some shots later on in the game.”

(Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports)

The 49ers did vary their usual Cover-3 and Cover-4 looks, and defensive coordinator Robert Saleh dialed some great stuff up to try and — well, if not confuse Mahomes, to at least delay his usual deadly responses when it’s time to make deep throws. Over and over, while the pressure was closing in, San Francisco would vary its safety looks — presenting Mahomes with single-high pre-snap looks to then morph into two-high concepts — and at times, vice-versa. The vice was closing for a while.

Limited to 12 completions in 18 attempts for 104 yards in the first half, Mahomes tried to take his shots later on. It did not always go well. He threw one interception to linebacker Fred Warner on a weird read on an attempt to receiver Tyreek Hill…

…and then, another pass to Hill bounced off the target and landed in the hands of cornerback Tarvarius Moore — a guy who had played a total of 155 coverage snaps all season.

It was the first interception of Moore’s career, the first time Mahomes had thrown more than one pick in a game since Week 11 of the 2018 season, and San Francisco’s resulting touchdown made the game 20-10, and seemed to put the thing in the bag for a defense that had Mahomes on the ropes.

Of course, every team the Chiefs have played in the playoffs thought they had the Chiefs on the ropes. The Texans had a 24-0 lead in the divisional round, and lost. The Titans had a 10-0 lead in the conference championship round, and lost. The 49ers had 10-0 and 20-10 leads, and then all hell broke loose.

It could be that like Rocky Balboa, Mahomes is the kind of fighter who has to get hit a few times before he wakes up, and then, he just starts beating the living daylights out of the defense unfortunate enough to be on the other side of the equation.

“That team, that’s kind of how they’ve been all year,” 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said. “They’re not a team that does it every drive. They get a little bit hot and cold. They can score very fast. That’s why there were two playoff games where they were cold to start and they were down, and by halftime, they fixed it in both games. That’s how the team is. That team doesn’t do it every time, but it was a matter of time.”

Shanahan, the Falcons’ offensive coordinator in their infamous 28-3 collapse against the Patriots in Super Bowl LI at the end of the 2016 season, now has to deal with the reality of another blown double-digit lead in a Super Bowl.

For the Chiefs, such handicaps seem like minor obstacles at best, as long as Mahomes is on their side.

Kansas City defensive tackle Chris Jones, who deflected three Jimmy Garoppolo passes and might have taken the Defensive MVP award if such a thing was given in the Super Bowl, sounded like a cross between a Baptist preacher and Muhammad Ali when describing his quarterback, and the belief his teammates have in him.

“There was no doubt in my mind we were gonna win,” Jones exhorted. “We went down 10, the game went a little shifty up and down, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. We got ‘MVPat’ on our side. We’ve got the fastest and best receiver corps IN THE LEAGUE [emphasis very much his]. And our defense? Sack Nation, baby! They’re gonna make a movie about this!”

When they do, the turning point of the plot will inevitably be Mahomes’ 44-yard completion to Hill with 7:13 left in the game. The Chiefs had third-and-15 at that point, still down 20-10, and

“They were playing this kind of robber coverage all game long, where the safety was coming down and robbing our deep crossing routes. We had a good play call on where [tight end Travis] Kelce did a little stutter deep cross. We had Tyreek getting one-on-one with that safety, and the biggest thing is that we needed really good protection. It was a long route. It was actually the same play we ran against New England in the playoffs last year [the 2018 AFC Championship game], getting him down the sideline. We had great protection, I put it out there, and Tyreek made a great play.”

All-22 tape from that New England game shows how the Chiefs and Hill (at the top of the screen) confounded the Patriots with it. Hill was in the outside slot in both instances; the Chiefs just flipped the play this time around.

Another kill shot was the 38-yard completion to receiver Sammy Watkins with 3:58 left in the game. Watkins beat cornerback Richard Sherman downfield on a straight press coverage matchup — the kind Sherman usually wins.

“I just knew it was one-on-one from film study,” Watkins said. “On a play where he was covering [Packers receiver] Davante Adams], I saw [Sherman] coming off an inside release when he’d been playing heavy outside the whole game. I knew Pat could make the throw, and that’s why we work on those types of situations.”

That put the ball on the San Francisco 10-yard line, and the Chiefs scored the go-ahead touchdown three plays later on a five-yard pass to running back Damien Williams.

From there, it was all academic.

Sherman was as quiet after the game as you’ll ever hear him; that Watkins touchdown certainly weighed on his mind, as did several others he and the rest of the 49ers will replay over and over in their heads all offseason. But there was no shame in San Francisco’s performance; they simply came up against a quarterback who is uniquely engineered to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat at a level and with a frequency we may never have seen before.

Earlier this week, Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner told me that Mahomes may become the most complete quarterback the NFL has ever seen. As sloppy as this performance was at times, it was actually a huge part of that progression. Mahomes faced an absolutely elite defense that had his number, and in the end, it still didn’t matter.

Patrick Mahomes was going to win this game, and as long as he believed it to be so, the belief would become reality. That he can wrap something as hard as winning a Super Bowl around that displays, more than ever, how uniquely incredible he is.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”