Mahomes ready for toe-tally fresh start

Chiefs QB has foot surgery, vows to bounce back from Super Bowl flop

After his worst game as an NFL quarterback in the Feb 7 Super Bowl, Kansas City Chiefs superstar Patrick Mahomes won't be toeing the line in his rigorous offseason training regimen anytime soon.

Last week the 25-year-old had surgery on the turf-toe injury he sustained in the second round of the playoffs, and he'll likely be sidelined for up to three months.

Turf toe is the result of severely bending the big toe upwards toward the top of the foot. It's also called hyperextension and often causes a painful tearing of the ligaments surrounding the toe.

In losing 31-9 to Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV, Mahomes was pressured on 29 of his 59 drop-backs－the most in Super Bowl history－behind a porous offensive line decimated by injuries. He wound up completing just 26 of 49 pass attempts for 270 yards, with two interceptions and no touchdowns.

It marked just the fifth time in 54 career games, including playoffs, that Mahomes failed to throw a TD strike and the first time the Chiefs failed to reach the end zone at all. His passer rating of 52.3 was more than 10 points below the previous worst of his career.

"As of today, I'm going to do whatever I can to look at the film and try to find ways to get better," Mahomes said ahead of his surgery. "Obviously with our offense and the success that we've had, when other teams see the defensive plan Tampa Bay had and how well it worked, they're going to try to do the same thing."

While he's recovering, Mahomes will no doubt ponder what might have been had he opted for a career in pro baseball.

The son of retired 11-year MLB veteran Patrick Mahomes Sr was a highly touted pitching prospect with a low-90s fastball coming out of high school. He was selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 37th round of the 2014 draft, after he'd already committed to play football at Texas Tech.

Excitement was high when Mahomes reached campus in the fall of 2014 and took over the starting QB job as a freshman－once throwing for 598 yards and six touchdowns in a win over Baylor. When the football team switched to morning practices in the spring, Mahomes pulled double duty, working out with the baseball team in the afternoons.

"He was throwing in the low to mid 90s and got picked up in the draft out of high school so we were like, 'This guy could be legit,'" Tyler Floyd, a catcher for Tech from 2014-16, told mlb.com.

"But during football season, Pat put on probably 30 or 40 pounds (14 or 18 kilograms) of muscle, and he gets out there to play baseball and he just couldn't throw. It's a different motion, and it's like he had the yips－it wasn't really a mental thing, it was just his body changed so much in such a short period of time that the baseball never really came back."

That certainly wasn't for lack of trying.

Floyd recalled one practice when Mahomes was on second base and took off for third before the pitcher started his delivery.

"And sure enough the pitcher delivers, and Pat is standing up at third," he said. "The coach goes crazy, because he loves guys that are very scrappy, very hard-nosed and baseball-savvy. And that's just what you got with Pat. Was he physically ready to play baseball when he got out of football season? I don't know if he was. But mentally, you could put him in a game and he was savvy enough to compete."

Mahomes remained on the Texas Tech roster as a part-time player, losing his only start on the mound and going 0-for-3 at the plate.

"When he was on our team in '15, he was throwing an incredible amount of footballs every day and studying a lot of football through the spring, but there was never a time when we were going, 'Where's Patrick?'" Floyd said. "If there was ever a time when he was supposed to be there, he was there. He's the epitome of a great teammate."

Just one more reason why he's been so successful on the gridiron.