When Patrick Mahomes was intercepted by 49ers safety Jaquiski Tartt with the Niners up 20-10 in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, there were some thoughts that the NFC team might put the game away.
Those thoughts were not being discussed with Mahomes on the Chiefs sideline. As he told Peter King for Football Morning in America, the message was that the Chiefs could still rally to win the game and he heard it more often than he would have liked before all was said and done.
“Almost every single person that came up to me right there said, ‘We still got time left. You’re still good. We’re still gonna have time to go down there and put up points,’” Mahomes said. “It was almost a little annoying because I knew we had time left. There was one point, Matt Moore, a guy that was vital in us being where we were at this season, he came up to me, and he was like the last guy to come up to me and say something. He said, ‘We still got a lot of time left. You gotta believe.’ And I almost gave him a little bit of an attitude. I was like, ‘I know we got time left!!!’”
Moore said that Mahomes later came over to apologize because the backup quarterback was “like the 15th person to say something to me.” Mahomes also said that the encouragement helped give him “the confidence to go out there and keep slinging the ball around,” so a little annoyance wound up working out well for Kansas City.