The San Francisco 49ers lost the super bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs in devastating fashion last Sunday. The Chiefs won in overtime at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas as the improbable Patrick Mahomes completed a three yard game-winning touchdown pass to Mecole Hardman to seal the Chiefs third NFL championship in five years and second in a row.
Now the Chiefs and Mahomes are set up to potentially pull off the impossible next season. If they can win yet another super bowl they will be the first NFL Franchise to ever win three championships in a row. Yet perhaps for Patrick Mahomes it’s more inevitable than impossible.
There’s an abundant pool of reasons the Niners lost, or should have won. There’s a myriad of game changing stats, and franchise defining plays that can be referenced, but these have all been written about innumerable times by this point.
With every possible excuse available for the Niners choking away yet another Super Bowl. Including maybe the Taylor Swift theory, 12 cut-to’s for a total of 55 seconds (according to USA Today), but perhaps what it really comes down to is the irrepressible agency of greatness, personified in the form of Patrick Mahomes.
Every once in a while the sports world throws up an athlete that is so individually unstoppable that their victory, and your team’s defeat becomes a foregone conclusion.
Though there have been countless elite level athletes across all sports, only two come to mind that have individually dominated in team sports the way Mahomes is currently doing. Tom Brady, Mahomes’ predecessor as the best quarterback in football – and current greatest quarterback of all time – had the same indomitable mojo. Then there’s the apex predator of dominant athletes, Michael Jordan, who to this day is still the most individually unstoppable athlete of all time. When Jordan was 100 percent focused on basketball absolutely no one else was going to win.
With this latest victory, Mahomes has joined that extremely exclusive club and may one day be the leader. Mahomes is without a doubt the most individually unstoppable athlete in the world and currently reminds me of Jordan more than Brady ever did.
Just to be clear, I’m no Chiefs fan. In fact, I’m a lifelong Niners fan, which makes this opinion piece a particularly tough one to write. I’m not attributing the Chiefs win and overall success solely to Mahomes, but when he’s on the field, no one wants to win more than him.
When combined with his otherworldly talent, the outcome is inevitable: the Chiefs win, everybody else loses. As for my beloved Niners, Mahomes’ latest and now second-time victim, this is gonna be a tough one to bounce back from. Just ask the 2015 Seattle Seahawks, or the 2016 Atlanta Falcons, two franchises that have yet to recover from their own heartbreaking, seemingly improbable, but ultimately inevitable defeat.
