Patrick Mahomes suffered the worst loss in his professional football career in Super Bowl LV, the first time the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback has ever lost a game by double digits in the NFL. It was the first time it happened in 54 starts (regular season and postseason) and the 31-9 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is the worst defeat for Mahomes as a starting quarterback since a 66-10 loss in 2016 to Iowa State when he was at Texas Tech.
Mahomes finished 26 of 49 for 270 yards with no touchdowns and two interceptions for a 52.3 passer rating, the lowest rating in his eight playoff starts. In both of Mahomes' playoff losses, he has a completion percentage under 60 percent -- this was a product of a poor offensive line (missing Mitchell Schwartz, Eric Fisher, and Kelechi Osemele as the starters from the beginning of the season), an excellent game plan from Buccaneers defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, and dropped passes.
Mahomes refused to point to any of the issues as an excuse for the worst game of his career.
"They had a good game plan. They kind of took away all our deep stuff, took away the sideline and they did a good job of rounding to the football and making tackles," Mahomes said after the loss. "We weren't executing early, I had a few miscues, we weren't on the same page, but credit to them man, they played a heck of a game defensively and offensively and beat us.
"I just don't think we were on the same page as an offense in general. I wasn't getting the ball out on time, the receivers were running routes to not where I thought they were going to be at and the offensive line, they did good sometimes and sometimes they let guys through. When you play a good defense like that, you got to be on the same page and we weren't (Sunday) and that's why we played so bad."
Mahomes had his first career game with zero touchdowns in any category and two-plus interceptions. He was pressured a Super Bowl-record 29 times and Mahomes ran for a total of 497 yards (according to NFL's Next Gen Stats). Mahomes entered the game with an all-time best 109.4 postseason passer rating and exited with the fifth-best at 100.4.
Mahomes still has 191 completions and 2,324 yards in his postseason career. He has the most playoff completions in a player's first four NFL seasons and finished just 4 yards shy of Russell Wilson (2,328) for the most playoff passing yards in a player's first four years. Mahomes is 6-2 in the postseason and still has a Super Bowl MVP before turning 26 -- they'll be plenty of opportunities to rebound from this playoff loss.
"Yeah I mean my dad lost in the World Series in his career and he continued to battle and continued to be who he was, and obviously it hurts right now," Mahomes said. "It hurts a lot, but we're going to continue to get better. We have a young group of guys who have had a lot of success and learned from that and have had a few failures and we have to learn from that.
"We can't let this define us. We have to continue to get better, going into next year being even better and preparing ourselves to hopefully be in this game again."
