By Adam
The last full game Patrick Mahomes played in 2025 was a December date with Houston, and it was the kind of game that had never happened to him before. He completed 14 of 33 passes for 160 yards, threw no touchdowns and three interceptions, and the most productive thing he did all game was run for 59 yards. A week later he got through one more start against the Chargers, threw for 189 yards and another pick, and then he didn't play again. Kansas City finished the season with somebody else at quarterback while the best player of his generation watched from the sideline.
That is not how anyone pictured a Mahomes season ending, and the numbers around it were not much kinder. He finished with 3,587 passing yards, 22 touchdowns and 11 interceptions across 14 games. Set that against his own history and the slide is hard to miss. In 2022 he threw for 5,250 yards and 41 touchdowns. The year after that it was 4,183 and 27. Then 3,928 and 26. Then last season's line, the lowest yardage and touchdown totals of any year in which he started more than one game. He also missed a week in November before the injury that ended his December, so the durability that used to be a given has stopped being one. He opens this camp on the injury report again, listed as questionable as of this week.
So the question hanging over Kansas City's season is a strange one to type: is Patrick Mahomes done being Patrick Mahomes, or was last year the dip before the correction?
I think it was the dip, and the reason is less about him than about what the Chiefs put around him this spring.
The back they went and got
Kansas City signed Kenneth Walker III away from Seattle, and it is the most interesting fit on the roster. Walker just put together the most complete season of his career: 17 games, 221 carries, 1,027 yards on the ground, plus 31 catches out of the backfield. It was his first thousand-yard year since his rookie season, and more importantly it was the first time in four professional seasons he answered the bell every single week. This is a runner who had been good but never available, and at exactly the moment he became both, the Chiefs bought.
What a real running game does for a quarterback coming off a bad year is not complicated. It takes third and eight and turns it into third and four. It gives the play fake a reason to be respected. Mahomes spent stretches of last season as the entire offense, and his 64 carries and five rushing touchdowns tell you how often the answer to a broken play was his own legs. Walker exists so that stops being the plan. He is on the report as questionable this week too, which is worth watching, but the shape of the idea is right.
The rookie nobody was watching
The other addition cost almost nothing, which is what makes him fun. Cyrus Allen is a 23-year-old receiver out of Cincinnati who the Chiefs took in the fifth round, 176th overall, in April. He is listed at 5-11 and 180 pounds, which is to say the league saw a smaller receiver from a program that doesn't produce many headlines and let him sit until day three.
Fifth-round receivers do not usually matter in September. But Kansas City has spent years hunting for speed and separation on the outside, and a rookie in that spot has one job: give Mahomes somewhere to go with the ball when the first read is covered. Every great Mahomes season has featured somebody like that, a receiver who was nobody's headline until the throws started finding him. As of this morning, with cuts landing around the league, he is still on the active roster, which is the first box checked. The rest gets decided in games.
Why the bounce back is the bet
Here is the honest version of the case. The arm talent did not go anywhere; even in last year's wreckage he had afternoons of 352 yards against the Colts and four touchdowns against Dallas. What failed was everything around the position: no run game to lean on, no cheap yards, and a December injury that ended the fight early. The Chiefs looked at that and made the two most direct repairs available, a proven back entering his prime and a lottery ticket at receiver.
Quarterbacks with his résumé, coming off their worst season, with a front office that spent the offseason fixing the exact problems that caused it, tend to make the league regret the doubt. The health is the one real question, and it is a fair one, because the questionable tag is still on him as camp closes. But if he is on the field in week one against Denver, the setup for the correction is already in the building.