This week, at a press conference announcing his executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, President Donald Trump made sure to point out Sen. Tommy Tuberville in the audience. Tuberville, in addition to being a booster of Trump’s anti-trans agenda, is also a former college football coach. Tuberville coached at Texas Tech, Patrick Mahomes’ alma mater, and Trump zeroed in on that fact, telling a confusing anecdote about how the the Chiefs’ star quarterback had made Tuberville into a better coach. “He’s a pretty good quarterback, right? Yeah, he was very good. And he’s a good guy too,” Trump gushed.
Except, not surprisingly, Trump made all that up. Tuberville left Texas Tech before Mahomes arrived and had nothing to do with Mahomes’ success.
Source: this picture
— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T21:46:03.328Z
That Trump lies isn’t new. But the fact that he and Tuberville are lying about their proximity to Mahomes says more about the quarterback’s massive cachet than the men trying desperately to cash in on it. The awkward kid recruited by Tuberville’s replacement Kliff Kingsbury is now one of the most powerful people on the planet. And he may be about to become even more so.
On Sunday, Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles — again — in Super Bowl LIX. If the Chiefs prevail in New Orleans, Mahomes will have done something that no other quarterback (or team) has ever done: won three consecutive Super Bowls. It would be difficult to find a more unlikely person to accomplish such a feat. This is not a Manning brother, fated for greatness since birth, or a Joe Montana, with his Golden Boy aura. And that makes his story more impressive, not less — and may just be a reason to cheer for him.
Mahomes, like the Manning brothers, does come from an athletic family, but not in the way you’d suspect. His father, Pat, was a middling middle relief pitcher for the Minnesota Twins and the New York Mets, among other teams, back in the 1990s; Pat’s godfather is LaTroy Hawkins, a truly great reliever and his father’s teammate while both played for the Twins. Mahomes was thus considered more of a baseball prospect, but he insisted on focusing on football even though he ranked far outside even the top 1,000 high school prospects as a graduating senior.
As Trump noted, Mahomes ended up going to Texas Tech, hardly a football hotbed at the time (in part because Tuberville’s previous struggles running the program). He started as a sophomore but went 7-6, getting blown out by LSU 56-27 in the Texas Bowl.
Then, in his junior year of college, it finally all clicked.
This shift is credited in large part to Kingsbury’s innovative offense (Kingsbury revitalized the Washington Commanders’ offense this year in the NFL). But in 2016, Mahomes broke all sorts of offensive records en route to winning the Sammy Baugh Award for best quarterback in college football. The Chiefs actually traded up to draft him the next year — with the Bills, adding another layer of tragedy to the Chiefs’ annual ritualistic soul-crushing of that team — and, after sitting a year on the bench, he took over as the starting quarterback in 2018.
An undersized former baseball prospect against the great Brady? How could you not cheer for him? In his first season as starter, Mahomes led the Chiefs all the way to the AFC championship game, where they lost to a New England Patriots team headed for its final Super Bowl title of the Tom Brady era. And while he’s no longer the underdog, at the time everyone was rooting for Mahomes to take down Brady. An undersized former baseball prospect against the great Brady? How could you not cheer for him? Since then, Mahomes has had a hard time losing, winning a Super Bowl the next season, losing to Brady (now with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) in Super Bowl LV, and then winning the next two. But Mahomes has not accomplished this remarkable feat through physical dominance. American Football Conference rivals Josh Allen of the Bills and Lamar Jackson of the Ravens are both better athletes. And yet he keeps beating them. Indeed, Mahomes’ numbers have actually been down the last two seasons; he finished seventh in MVP voting last year and doesn’t have a chance of winning the honor this year either. But he keeps finding ways to win, through calm efficiency, a knack for the big moment and, yeah, probably a little bit of the home referee cooking that every superstar from Brady to Montana to Aikman enjoyed throughout their career. That someone like Mahomes — only the third Black quarterback to win the Super Bowl, and the second to win Super Bowl MVP, something he has now done three times — could ascend to those heights is flabbergasting. That he keeps doing it has made it seem easy, or even inevitable, when it’s the exact opposite. It gets a little harder every year. Now, Mahomes has the chance to do something no one has ever done; not Brady, not Montana, not Terry Bradshaw. It’s remarkable, and a true underdog story. Mahomes has shaped himself into a star that even the president is (falsely) bragging about. I suppose, in 2025, that’s how you know you’ve truly made it.
Will Leitch
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his new novel, “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now, and the upcoming "The Time Has Come." 
