Patrick Mahomes of (not your) Kansas City Chiefs is pretty boring away from the field. He has a wife he loves and children, but he doesn't normally do the Aaron Rodgers thing of espousing views that the extreme would love. Mahomes doesn't need to. He just wins games and Super Bowls. The outspoken part can come later.
Or can it? Mahomes has been successful enough to be as snarky as he wants to be. One might also wonder if he is a bit more cutting behind the scenes. This is based on a joke he made this week about former Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.
After leaving Seattle, Wilson played for the Chiefs' AFC West rival Denver Broncos. The quarterback spent just two years with the Broncos, but they certainly were not the best years of his career. This is partly because in his first season, when he was working with head coach Nathanial Hackett and not current Broncos coach Sean Payton, Wilson did whatever he wanted and was unchecked.
Patrick Mahomes throws shade at former Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson
He even had his own office, a unique thing for a player in the NFL. In fact, Wilson acted as if he was the new Aaron Rodgers and attempted to wield great power within the organization. Unfortunately for him, he has not been as good in his career as Rodgers has been.
Once the losses began to mount for Denver in 2022, Wilson's first season with the team, the quarterback's eccentricities began to be more exposed. His drive to make sure everyone knows he is working hard and saying the right things comes across as false many times. For instance, while dealing with a hamstring issue on a flight from Denver to London for a game, the QB said he was doing knee raises to try to loosen his leg.
As part of his statement to the media, though, Wilson accidentally made it seem like he was working harder than any of his teammates.
He said, "I was on the plane, first two hours of the eight-hour flight here I was watching film, watching all the cutups and everything else, and then for the next four hours I was doing treatment on the plane. I was walking up and down the aisle, everybody else was knocked out, I was doing high knees, working my legs and everything else, making sure I was ready to rock. That was good. Then I fell asleep for one hour and I watched film for the rest. I felt good to go."
Wilson appeared to be bragging and he did not seem to know it. The general reaction to his words was scorn and laughter.
This brings us back to Patrick Mahomes. He hurt his ankle in Week 15 but is likely to play in Week 16. In addressing the media on Tuesday, he gave a breakdown of what he was doing to try to make sure he was game-ready for the Chiefs game against the Houston Texans on Saturday. As part of his preparation, Mahomes was doing some work on the flight back from playing the Cleveland Browns.
One reporter asked Mahomes what kind of work he was doing on the plane and Mahomes said, "I wasn't doing high knees or anything like that."
That was a clear slight of Wilson, who no longer plays in the same division with Mahomes. Some rivalries never die.