Chiefs eyeing title but want more ‘fun’ along way

Adam Teicher, ESPN Staff WriterJul 16, 2024, 05:41 PM ET
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- Covered Chiefs for 20 seasons for Kansas City Star
- Joined ESPN in 2013

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — The Kansas City Chiefs accomplished all of their goals in the 2023 season, including a second straight Super Bowl championship. But Patrick Mahomes said the unusual way they arrived there, with an inconsistent offense that usually didn’t resemble its recent predecessors, left the Chiefs with “a weird feeling.”

The idea at training camp, which begins at Missouri Western State University on Wednesday with a three-day camp for quarterbacks and rookies, is to work out any offensive problems and be at full efficiency when the regular season begins, according to Mahomes.

“We’re back at St. Joe,” Mahomes said. “It’s time to get better. Every season starts differently. You’ve got to come in with that same mentality you had the year before, even with a higher intensity and even though we won the Super Bowl last year, we felt like we didn’t play our best football, especially offensively. So it’s our goal to be better that way and coming in with that mentality every single day.

“The end result [last season] was awesome, but I think a lot of us still have a weird feeling in our mouth . . . It wasn’t fun every single week having to try to just continue to get better and better and the results not paying off the way you wanted to. It wasn’t a lot of fun. We have a lot of those same guys back and they know how that felt and so we’re going to try to prepare ourselves better this year so that we can play better throughout the season and obviously try to end with the same result.”

Full team training camp begins for the Chiefs on Sunday.

The Chiefs, in an effort to improve their passing game and get more big plays, added two fast wide receivers in free agent Marquise Brown and rookie Xavier Worthy, a first-round draft pick. Mahomes indicated he was eager to see how both players fit in, particularly Worthy, who missed most of offseason practice because of a sore hamstring.

“We added a lot of speed,” Mahomes said. “What’s better than going against our defense? It’s the best defense in the NFL and we get to go against them every single day and really show where we’re at and how we can get better.”

Worthy ran a 4.21 40 at the scouting combine, the fastest recorded time in event history.

“There’s no easing [him in],” Mahomes said. “He’s going to have to be ready to go. We got a lot of competition on this offense.

“He got a lot of mental work in these last few weeks that he had during OTAs and minicamp, but it’s time to go now. Y’all saw it with Rashee [Rice] last year and some of the throwing-up days he had. We’re going to push you to the limit and prepare yourself to be ready to go for the season. That’s not just him. That’s everybody and everybody has to have that mentality when they come into camp.”

Off the field, Mahomes and wife Brittany are expecting their third child.

“I’m done,” Mahomes said. “I’ll say that. I said three and I’m done.”

“It’s awesome,” he continued. “I always wanted to have kids young. I got to grow up in the locker room. I think I’ve talked about it before and it made such an impact in my life and so I wanted to have kids young and we’re having our third kid now to join our family and Brittany does a great job of doing that and we still go out and enjoy our life and let our kids see these great things they might not be able to remember what videos of and it is really cool. I spend so much time in the building at football for these seven, eight months and whenever I’m with my family, I want to enjoy those moments.”