The game had been over for almost four hours, and Andy Reid made his way through the lobby of the team hotel, with the Chiefs’ party picking up steam an easy Patrick Mahomes throw away. Every few feet, someone was stopping the coach—outfitted for the Scottsdale night in a Hank Stram-style blazer emblazoned with the K.C. arrowhead, bright red tie and pocket square—for a handshake, hug or a congrats, and it continued as he and his wife, Tammy, made their way past a set of ropes and into a VIP area, and well into the evening.
The sheer volume of well-wishes underscored something significant on the evening Reid won his second Super Bowl, and that something kept showing up after the game.
Earlier, in a locker room choked out with cigar smoke and soaked in sprayed champagne, Chiefs VP of sports medicine and performance Rick Burkholder, sitting on a folding chair, generated a similar scene simply by pulling assistant athletic trainers Julie Frymyer and David Glover close, to explain how Mahomes made it through Super Bowl LVII after reaggravating the high ankle sprain he initially suffered three weeks earlier.
“That’s Julie—the famous Julie,” said Burkholder, pointing at Frymyer, who led the QB’s rehab. “And David, David did Juju [Smith-Schuster]’s rehab. I wanted them to be there.”
Just then, Mahomes showed up and hugged Frymyer so hard he pulled her off the ground.
You don’t need Vince Lombardi to tell you that the Chiefs are here, Super Bowl champions for the second time in four seasons, in large part because of what Reid and Mahomes bring to the organization. It’s obvious, and the markings of it are all over the Kansas City operation.
And yet, to get this one, and outlast an Eagles team that came in firing on all cylinders and played an exquisite first half, it was always going to take a lot more than just that.
Simply because the Eagles were so good, it would take everyone and, in the end, it everyone who wound up turning a 24–14 halftime deficit on its head and positioning the Chiefs to hang in, hang in, hang in, then start landing the haymakers needed in a 38–35 win. Which is why, when I sat with Reid in his small, cramped office off the locker room at State Farm Stadium, just after the win, he mentioned Mahomes first, but didn’t stop there.
“Listen, I thought Pat played well,” he says, almost matter-of-factly. “I thought the offensive line stepped their game up. I thought [Isiah] Pacheco ran hard, got the run game going. Our defense got a couple stops that were big, real big, and we were able to capitalize on at least one of those, which was important.”
In a game where the margins were razor thin, all of it was important.
And all of it is why the Chiefs are champs again.
