He’s only been the starting quarterback for two years, but Patrick Mahomes is already the face of the franchise in Kansas City. The Chiefs’ scintillating signal caller was named league MVP following his rookie campaign, and on Sunday, he’ll lead his team into Hard Rock Stadium against the San Francisco 49ers with the hopes of winning the first Super Bowl in the organization’s history.
Mahomes’ future is also, to an extent, up in the air. His contract is up at the end of the 2020 season, and as Adam Schefter of ESPN has reported in the past, there is a belief that Mahomes could earn the first $200 million contract in league history. As for whether or not he’ll get that, here’s what Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt said on Tuesday.
“I’ve said before that I hope Patrick is here for his entire career and that’s going to be our goal,” Hunt said, per the Kansas City Star. “But there will be a right time, sometime in the next 12-15 months to extend Patrick and when I say right time, I mean right time for both, the player and the club. I don’t want to say it has to necessarily be this off-season but I will say it’s a priority to get it done.”
A comment that indicates the team would possibly kick this can down the road and not deal with it as soon as possible could certainly set off some alarm bells, but on Wednesday, Mahomes indicated that he believes home is where the heart is, and for him, his heart’s in Kansas City. Mahomes told the press that “I hope I get to play there the rest of my career now,” and waxed poetic about the situation he walked into after the team traded up to grab him in the 2017 NFL Draft.
“I think I ended up in the perfect place,” Mahomes said. “To have coach (Andy) Reid and these coaches around me, to have Alex Smith in front of me for a year and be able to learn from him, and obviously to have all the players that I have around me. I’m in a place where the team was already a winning team, a team that had a lot of success and I came in, was able to just be who I am and ended up being able to win a lot of football games early in my career.”
The winning certainly has happened quicker than many could have imagined, and now, he’ll have the chance to reach the pinnacle of the sport on Sunday evening.
