NFL star Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs, sounded off after an NFL game scheduling decision to add a slate of Wednesday games to the 2024 season means that the league will have games played on December 25, Christmas Day. Mahomes and his Chiefs are scheduled to play on that sacred day.
In fact, the Chiefs are one of four teams scheduled to spend Christmas Day at work on the turf. They will be playing the Pittsburgh Steelers on Christmas, which will, in addition to being on a very inappropriate day for work, means they will have to play three games in 11 days; they also play the Cleveland Browns on Dec. 15 and the Houston Texans on Dec. 21. In addition to the Chiefs and Steelers, the Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans are playing on Christmas.
Sadly, this isn’t the first year that the Kansas City Chiefs have had to play on Christmas Day itself. In fact, they’ve now had to do it two years in a row, spending time on the field rather than with family. Last year, for the 2023 season, Mahomes and the Chiefs had to face off against the Las Vegas Raiders in a Christmas Day game, which then occurred on a Monday.
Commenting on the matter to reports on Wednesday, December 11, Mahomes told them that playing that many games that quickly is a bad idea, saying, as Fox News Digital reports, “It’s not a good feeling. You never want to play this amount of games in this short of time. It’s not great for your body. But, at the end of the day, it’s your job, your profession.” Noting the Christmas angle in that part of the interview, he said, I’m excited to play on Christmas to hopefully get back from what we did last year.”
He added, on that same note about having to work because that’s his job, regardless of what he thinks about the decision, Mahomes said, “You have to come to work and do it.” Then, adding to that original point about having to play so many games in such a short period, when a reporter asked if he’d played 3 games in 11 days before, he said, “I haven’t in football.”
He added, speaking about getting prepared and just doing what one can do to be ready for the game and the others around it, “All you can do is focus on the game. The practice you have that day. I try to prepare my body all year long for this stretch. That’s tailoring my workouts, tailoring how you practice and prepare.”
Then, speaking about the coaching staff for the Kansas City Chiefs and what they do to help the players out in situations like this, Mahomes told the reporters, “And the coaches do a great job of taking care of us on the practice field. We practice as hard as anybody, but they know how to dial it back when needed.” Kansas City head coach Andy Reid, for his part, said, “That’s a unique situation. You just have to manage it. It is what it is. You make the best of it.”
Speaking about his Christian faith in the past, Mahomes said, “I feel like I’ve grown in my faith these last few years, and I think that’s given me more sense of who I am and why I play the game. It just kind of relieves the pressure of playing a football game because I know that I’m on that football field to glorify Him before everything. So, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about going out there and being the best that I can in His name.”
Featured image credit: By All-Pro Reels from District of Columbia, USA – Patrick Mahomes, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112095786
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