Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes admitted after the loss to the Tennessee Titans in Week 7 that he had been pressing at times.
The fourth-year starter felt the pressure early on in the season to score every drive, and not just because of his aggressive mentality. It was because he didn’t seem to fully trust his defense to be able to get a stop. Who could really blame him, though? In the early goings of the season, when opponents got into the red zone, teams had nearly a 100% chance of scoring points. That puts a lot of pressure on a young quarterback, especially one as talented as Mahomes.
Over the past few weeks, as the defense has begun to find its footing, Mahomes has learned a valuable lesson. It’s a lesson that he feels every quarterback in the league needs to learn at some point in time.
“I think these last few weeks have been big for me,” Mahomes told reporters on Wednesday. “I’ve learned that we can punt the ball and back the team up and that the defense is going to make stops. I think that’s big for me individually because I’m always going to be that someone that wants to score every single drive. I still have that mindset of, when I hit the field I want to score touchdowns. But to know that we have that defense that’s going to go out there and stop them, or that Tommy (Townsend) is going to pin them inside the 10-yard line, we’re going to get the ball back. And whenever we do have that drive to end the game that we’re going to make it happen. That’s something that you’ve got to learn as a quarterback in this league.”
Mahomes has grown personally from this experience, recognizing he doesn’t have to carry the team. At the same time, he feels the team has grown in recent weeks, evolving to be able to win football games in a number of different ways.
“There’s a challenge in that we didn’t start the season the way we wanted to,” Mahomes said. “But I think these last few weeks have shown that we can win in different ways. The defense is playing good, special teams playing good and we’re doing enough as an offense right now. And I think that sort of comes with the adversity that we went through the last few seasons. We learned how to win games whenever it’s not pretty. Obviously, offensively we want to play better, but at the end of the day I’d rather win and play not great rather than what we had earlier in the season when we played a lot of good games offensively and lost.”
Improvement is still the goal for the Chiefs’ offense, defense and special teams. They’ve yet to play a complete game with each unit performing at their best. However, so long as they’re playing as a team, they’ll always have a chance to win games even if one of the three units struggles.
“You want to play as a team and I think that is the biggest thing,” Mahomes said. “You see now how the defense is playing, how the special teams is playing. Offensively, if we can just continue to get better and better each and every week, this team will be where we want to be at the end of the season.”
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