Patrick Mahomes Wants To Go 20-0 With Chiefs
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- You have to give the Chiefs credit for this: They sure do love to set some strange goals.
Last year, Tyreek Hill was busy telling the world that after winning one Super Bowl, the Chiefs were all dead-set on winning seven Super Bowls. They were chasing Michael Jordan, according to Hill, not Tom Brady. That Brady ended up killing their dreams of a back-to-back championship run was fitting.
And coming off that Super Bowl loss, superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes has a new goal.
He wants to go 20-0.
With the league moving to a 17-game schedule this season, Mahomes isn't taking a "one week at a time" approach. He's looking at the entirety of the slate -- all 17 games plus three playoff games -- and has decided he'd like to win them all.
"The only record I have my eyes set on breaking, which would be new this year, would be going 20-0," Mahomes told Bleacher Report. "It's not really a record to be broken, I guess you would say. I think 19-0 is the record right now, so being able to go 20-0 and being the first one to do that, that would be awesome."
Mahomes might have been trying to say that 19-0 has been the best possible record until now, but it certainly hasn't been achieved. As one or two folks in New England remember, the Patriots came up a few points short of reaching that mark back in Super Bowl XLII against the Giants. The Patriots went 18-1, and surely everyone on that team would have happily traded one of those regular-season wins for the Super Bowl, which is ultimately the only game that actually matters.
Nevertheless, Mahomes is setting out on perfection, and he obviously has reason to believe he can do it. The man has started 54 NFL games and has won 44 of them. (He's 3-3 in games started opposite Tom Brady, meaning Brady accounts for three of his 10 career losses.) When you've won more than 80 percent of your games, and you're obviously great, then it only follows that you believe you can improve on it a little bit.
But coming off a Super Bowl where he threw no touchdowns and two interceptions while completing 53 percent of his passes, setting out a 20-0 goal is still a slightly odd thing to aim for.
Yet that, one supposes, is the Chiefs' offseason way of doing business. Last year, it was aiming to win more championships than a basketball player for some reason. This year, it's setting out to break a 19-0 record that doesn't even exist.
He may not want to put all his eggs in that basket, though. Some reports have the NFL aiming for an 18-game regular season in 2025 or 2026. Going through all that trouble to go 20-0, just to have to try to go 21-0 a few years from now seems like a lot of work. For now, perhaps he and Hill can get back to chasing Michael Jordan, then they can try to catch up to Brady, and then at last they can slay the 21-0 dragon.
