You could feel it by October.
Every time Patrick Mahomes dropped back in 2018, Arrowhead held its breath for half a second… and then exploded.
Because something ridiculous was about to happen.
Remember the noise that offseason? The Chiefs had just traded away Alex Smith after a playoff season. They handed the keys to a kid with one career start. A gunslinger from Texas Tech who “freelanced too much.” A quarterback some analysts swore would throw 20 interceptions trying to play backyard ball in the NFL.
Then Week 1 happened.
Four touchdowns against the Chargers in Los Angeles. No nerves. No hesitation. Just lasers.
By Week 2 in Pittsburgh, it was six touchdown passes. Six. On the road. Against a playoff defense. The league went from skeptical to stunned in eight quarters.
And Mahomes never let up.
He finished 2018 with 5,097 passing yards and 50 touchdown passes. Fifty. The first quarterback since Tom Brady in 2007 to hit that number. He averaged 8.8 yards per attempt and posted a 113.8 passer rating while starting all 16 games.
This wasn’t empty production either. It was controlled chaos at the highest level.
No-look passes. Left-handed flicks. Deep balls that traveled 60 yards in the air without a wobble. He made throws that shouldn’t exist, and he did it in the biggest moments. The Week 11 Monday night showdown against the Rams in Los Angeles became an instant classic, and Mahomes threw six touchdowns in a 54-51 shootout that felt like a video game glitch.
By December, the MVP race was over. The only debate was whether anyone would ever do this again.
What made it even sweeter for Chiefs fans was how fast the narrative flipped. The same voices who questioned his mechanics were now scrambling for superlatives. Defensive coordinators admitted they had no answer. Cornerbacks started playing 10 yards off and still got burned.
And he wasn’t just padding stats. The Chiefs went 12-4. They locked up the AFC West. They earned the No. 1 seed in the AFC for the first time since 1997.
Mahomes was 23 years old.
Let that sink in.
A first-year starter. Fifty touchdowns. Five thousand yards. Home-field advantage in the AFC playoffs. An offense that averaged 35.3 points per game and felt unstoppable every Sunday.
Yes, the season ended in heartbreak in the AFC Championship Game against New England. We all remember the coin toss. We all remember overtime. But nothing about that loss erased what Mahomes proved.
He wasn’t hype.
He wasn’t reckless.
He wasn’t a project.
He was the future of the league, and he announced it in one of the most explosive MVP seasons we’ve ever seen.
For Chiefs Kingdom, 2018 wasn’t just about numbers. It was the year the doubt died. The year the national media finally stopped questioning whether Kansas City could build around a superstar quarterback.
Mahomes didn’t just win MVP.
He made the entire NFL adjust to him.
And once he did that, the rest of the league was officially on notice.