Patrick Mahomes turned rehab into a competition. No surprise he's winning
ST. JOSEPH, MO – It would have been fitting enough if the Kansas City Chiefs had rolled out a red carpet at Scanlon Hall on Friday and lined the path with trumpets blaring as Patrick Mahomes arrived.
Sure, it’s only the start of training camp at Missouri Western State University – and rookie camp at that – but this is a big deal nonetheless.
Mahomes is here! And so is his left knee, surgically repaired, rehab-fortified and lathered up. The best quarterback in the NFL hit another milestone in his comeback journey, cleared to fully practice in any and all drills from Day 1 of camp.
“I’m excited,” Mahomes confirmed during a 12-minute news conference inside the players’ dorm. “I’ve been seeing cinder block walls rehabbing every single day in Kansas City.”
When Mahomes checked in, it had been 223 days since he was carted off the field at Arrowhead Stadium with a torn ACL and LCL in his left knee.
Shoot, back in the day an injury like that might have wiped out a player for a year-and-a-half. Yet here was Mahomes, 30, tracking to make it back for the Monday night regular season opener against the Denver Broncos on Sept. 14.
Here’s to modern medicine and advanced rehab. Mahomes got the clearance on Wednesday during a follow-up exam with his surgeon, Dan Cooper.
“This is just another checkpoint on the schedule, you know?” Mahomes said, offering obligatory caution to go with some extreme confidence. “And so, you have to continue to work. It’s not over and I’m not going to play a game tomorrow. You’ve got to continue to work and get better and better and go through all practice, and prove to the coaches, prove to the doctors and everybody that I’m the same quarterback I was before, if not better.”
injury update
It was telling that Chiefs coach Andy Reid won’t even rule out playing Mahomes in the preseason. That decision is for another day, and Reid is quick to maintain that they are still operating on a day-by-day assessment. When someone asked about the Week 1 target that Mahomes has always had in sight, Reid said, “You’ve got to see how things go there. Let’s just see where we’re at and not make any predictions or anything else.”
Still, Reid, whose team stumbled to 6-11 last season as the Chiefs missed the playoffs for the first time since 2014, knows how his quarterback is wired better than any of us. And I’d suspect that even if he doesn’t want to risk a setback during the preseason, there’s no need to declare anything definitive now. If I’m Reid, I’m pushing whatever buttons will keep the flow of this mojo moving.
Mahomes knows. This is not about being ready to rock for the preseason.
“We’ll just see when we get there,” he said. “Like, I’m a competitor, so, like game day, I’m gonna want to be out there. But I understand the process of getting myself ready in the regular season is more important, but we will see. I mean, the coaches and doctors will kind of make that decision for me, but I’ll prepare myself like I’m going to play. And then if I’m doing a ‘very hard warmup,’ I will take that as serious as playing in the preseason game.”
Listen to Mahomes and it is so apparent that recovering physically from such a serious injury constitutes just one significant portion of a comeback. It’s mental, too.
He reached out to Tom Brady for advice. It’s a striking coincidence that Mahomes, whose resume includes three Super Bowl rings, suffered his severe knee injury in his ninth season. Brady had won three Super Bowls, too, when he suffered a similar injury. It’s probably a given that Mahomes has connected with his former teammate, Tyreek Hill, over the course of his rehab. Hill, currently a free agent, is rehabbing from a dislocated kneecap and torn ACL and LCL.
Then there’s Zach Ertz, the free agent tight end who suffered a torn ACL a week before Mahomes was injured, while playing with the Commanders. Mahomes and Ertz (who was once coached by Mahomes’ college coach, Kliff Kingsbury) have struck quite a supportive bond with each other during their respective rehabs.
“We kind of had like competitions on where we were at and where we were rehabbing,” Mahomes said.
After they compared notes on how much they could deadlift in the weight room, Mahomes said, the “competition” advanced to include video exchanges. Ertz sent Mahomes a video showing his explosion in drills jumping on a box; Mahomes sent Ertz footage that captured him cutting to change direction.
“And so, it keeps the competition going,” Mahomes said. “It’s a long process and you feel like sometimes you’re lonely because you’re just doing stuff by yourself and you’re just competing against yourself. So, it gave me someone else that I can compete with to kind of push my competitive drive.”
Mahomes, given his abundance of competitive juice, mentioned “how much it hurt me” to watch the Chiefs’ final three games last season without him. Yet that wasn’t the hardest element of his setback to deal with mentally.
“Honestly, the toughest part was at the beginning, like, not being able to get up and chase my kids around,” Mahomes, father of three, said, reflecting on the holiday season that came shortly after his Dec. 15 surgery. “Like, I know it sounds crazy, but being a dad and being an active dad, I always want to be around my kids and playing and stuff like that. And so, I think that was tough. Once I was able to do that, it kind of motivated me to kind of keep getting better. So, when Bronze (Patrick III) plays a T-ball game or Sterling’s playing soccer, I can be out there with them.
“I always knew that I was going to get back here. And it’s just because of my mindset and the people that we have around me.”
More mental challenges – or at least markers – loom. As much as Mahomes has something to prove with his performance – he aims to get the ball out of his hand quicker and expects to run less after posting a career-high 422 rushing yards last season – at some point he will take a hit on the knee.
Of course, as was the case during offseason workouts, that won’t happen during training camp as the quarterbacks, clad in yellow jerseys, are off-limits.
“We’ve had people kind of on air coming at me and you’re moving, but it’s not the same as having Chris Jones chasing after you, you know?” said Mahomes, who will start off wearing a brace on the knee but hasn’t been told whether he will need to wear it for an extended period.
Whenever he takes a hit, it’ll be another marker.
“You’ll never know until you get out there and you get hit and you make plays,” he said. “But I trust the process I’ve been through.”
Until last season, the most time Mahomes missed during his NFL career came in 2019, when he missed two games due to a dislocated knee. Like now, he returned at an accelerated pace – which undoubtedly says something about how he’s physically wired to recover at a pace that is not typical.
He reflected wistfully of a marker upon his return in 2019 that indicated he was fully back. It came on a play when he improvised while trying to avoid a rush to throw a pass. And it clearly provided some perspective to draw on in the coming weeks.
“I have that throw where I jump and throw the ball and it looks cool, but I actually did it because I was running my knee out of there,” he recalled. “So, it’s just little things like that, you just have to build that confidence back.
“I’m glad you could do that from Day 1 of training camp. You know, I didn’t want to have to get only a couple weeks of practicing and then have to go play in a game. I wanted to build it up.”
In other words, get ready to roll out the red carpet and strike up the band.
Follow Jarrett Bell on X: @JarrettBell
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