Patrick Mahomes is 31 years old with 97 regular-season wins, and the strange thing about watching him reach that number is how much of his career already seems to belong to another era. The quarterback who threw 50 touchdown passes in his first season as Kansas City’s starter is now coming back from reconstructive knee surgery. He has years left to chase the records people began assigning him almost as soon as he arrived, but for the first time in a long time, it feels necessary to ask what those years will look like.
Sunday offered an encouraging answer. Mahomes threw for 382 yards and three touchdowns in a 33–30 overtime win over Indianapolis, taking the Chiefs to 2–0 and his record as a starter to 97–31. Late in a close game, Kansas City was once again able to ask a great deal of its quarterback and get what it needed. Given where he was nine months ago, that is a more meaningful development than the familiarity of the result might suggest.
That return needs to be understood against what was happening before he got hurt. Kansas City was already 6–7 after losing 20–10 to Houston a week before the knee injury. With that game tied in the fourth quarter, Mahomes threw an interception, and the offence subsequently failed on two fourth-down attempts. The opportunities to win were there, but a team that had made so much of those opportunities in previous seasons was wasting them. The Chiefs had stopped looking like the standard everyone else in the NFL had to meet.
The schedule deserves some consideration in judging that decline. Kansas City opened against the Chargers in Brazil before coming home to face the defending champion Eagles, and later had to travel to Buffalo and Denver. Its results also show how narrow the margins often were: four of its first seven defeats came by three points. There is a fair argument that the eventual 6–11 record made the team look worse than it was. Even allowing for that, Mahomes and the offence had problems to solve before his rehabilitation ever began.
His season ended on December 14 against the Chargers while he was trying to extend a play to his right. Da’Shawn Hand brought him down as he released the ball, and Mahomes’ planted left leg twisted beneath him. He reached for his knee and needed help off the field. The damage included tears to the ACL and LCL, with surgery in Dallas the following day.
There was something particularly unsettling about seeing him hurt on that kind of play. Mahomes has spent most of his career making it appear that a quarterback can negotiate his way out of almost any trouble, provided he has enough imagination and an arm capable of following through. Watching him leave with help was a reminder of how much that football depends on a body being able to do what he asks of it. However accomplished he was, he had to spend the offseason working toward the fairly basic objective of being available to play again.
By September 12, he had completed a full week of practice and carried no injury designation for the opener against Denver. Returning that quickly gave Kansas City its quarterback back, but there is a difference between being ready for September and knowing how a repaired knee will hold up through an entire season. His comeback gives this year a significance that a 31st birthday alone would not have carried.
It also makes it tempting to attribute every change in his game to the injury. That would be too convenient. Mahomes had been playing a different brand of football well before last December, and the distance between his recent numbers and that astonishing 2018 season was already substantial. He threw 27 touchdown passes in 2023 and 26 in 2024, followed by 22 in the season the injury cut short.
Those figures alone do not settle whether he was playing well. Mahomes has earned the right to be assessed by more than his resemblance to the quarterback he was in 2018, but a less spectacular style still has to produce an effective offence. The Houston loss showed why it was no longer enough to call every reduction in his numbers a sign of maturity. He was struggling to finish games that Kansas City had good chances to win.
There is still an important distinction between accepting that Mahomes has changed and assuming he has become a lesser quarterback. A game eventually presents a situation in which the offence needs more than the easy completion, and Sunday’s overtime supplied a useful example. Facing third-and-12, he found Tyquan Thornton for 30 yards to move the Chiefs into Indianapolis territory. Kansas City could continue toward the winning points because Mahomes delivered on a down that might otherwise have ended the possession.
That is the part of his game worth paying attention to as this season develops. There will be plenty of interest in how freely he moves after surgery, but the Chiefs also need to know whether they can keep trusting him with difficult situations. Sunday gave them a reason to do so, even if two games cannot establish what the rest of his comeback will bring.
His winning record makes it reasonable to expect a great deal. Last October, he passed Peyton Manning for the most regular-season victories by a quarterback at age 30 or younger. At 97–31, he has won almost 76 per cent of his starts. That is an extraordinary foundation for a run at becoming the game’s greatest winner, although Tom Brady’s 251 regular-season victories make clear how much of that pursuit still lies ahead. Mahomes needs another 155 to pass him, a distance that makes durability as important to the argument as anything he can throw.
What makes Mahomes worth believing in at 31 is how often he has justified the confidence placed in him. The injury has introduced uncertainty at a point when it was easy to start treating his future accomplishments as inevitable. After Sunday, though, Kansas City has a much better reason for optimism than an old highlight reel or a projection of his career totals. In his second game back, with a win still to be earned in overtime, Mahomes was able to make the throw the Chiefs needed.
