Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was held in check by a stingy Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense as the Bucs won Super Bowl LV on Sunday, denying Mahomes’ Chiefs their bid for back-to-back Lombardi trophies.
Mahomes and the electric Chiefs offense were limited to three field goals in the 31-9 loss on Sunday night.
“They were the better team today,” Mahomes said, according to ESPN’s Adam Teicher. “They beat us pretty good, the worst I think I’ve been beaten in a long time.
“They took away our deep stuff. They took away the sidelines and they did a good job of rallying to the football and making tackles. We weren’t executing early, had a few miscues. Guys weren’t on the same page. Credit to them. They played a heck of a game defensively and offensively to beat us.”
Mahomes went 26-of-49 for 270 yards and two interceptions, registering a 49.9 QBR which marked the second worst of his career.
“I just think we weren’t on the same page as an offense,” Mahomes said. “I wasn’t getting the ball out on time. The receivers were running routes not exactly where I thought they were going to be at. The offensive line, they were good sometimes and sometimes they let guys through. When you play a good defense like that, you’ve got to be on the same page as an offense, and we weren’t today and that’s why we played so bad.
“They were just better than us.”
Mahomes also talked about playing with a toe injury that may require surgery during the offseason, saying it had not bothered him during the Chiefs AFC Championship victory over the Buffalo Bills two weeks ago.
“I can’t say the toe was a problem when I played two weeks ago and I played well on it,” Mahomes said. “Anytime you play football, you have to battle through injuries. We’ll look at it tomorrow and we’ll make a final decision on if we’re going to have to have surgery on it or not.”
Mahomes and the Chiefs are enduring the pain of the defeat, but are looking to be even better next season.
“Obviously it hurts right now,” Mahomes said. “It hurts a lot. But we’re going to continue to get better. We have a young group of guys that had a lot of success and we learned from that, but we’ve had a few failures and we have to learn from that.
“We can’t let this define us. We have to continue to get better going into next year and prepare ourselves to hopefully be in this game again. We knew it wasn’t always going to be successful and we weren’t going to be able to win 1,000 championships in a row. We knew we were going to go through times like this and adversity. I think the best thing about it is the guys we have the leadership ability to be even better next year.”
