Tyreek Hill raised some eyebrows during the first episode of his new podcast It Needed to be Said when he not only talked about underlying issues with the Chiefs, but also said Tua Tagovailoa is more accurate than his former teammate Patrick Mahomes.
On the last day of Kansas City’s minicamp, Mahomes was asked if he was surprised by anything Hill said in the podcast. Mahomes laughed a little before saying that he was.
“I’m surprised a little just because I felt like we love Tyreek here. We’ve always loved him. We still love him,” Mahomes said in his press conference. “I saw him out at Formula 1 in Miami and everything like that. But I’m sure it had something to do with trying to get his podcast some stuff, get it rolling. But definitely I still love Tyreek. He’s a one-of-a-kind player.
“But as you know in coach Reid’s offense, it takes the whole team. This offense was rolling before I got here. This offense was rolling when I was a young Cowboys fan watching the Eagles beat up on the Cowboys. So I mean, it’s an offense that’s more than one player — and that includes myself.”
Head coach Andy Reid had a similar response when asked about Hill on Thursday, waiving off the comments.
“I love Tyreek, so I mean, he’s a good kid,” Reid said. “We think the world of him.”
Mahomes noted he hasn’t talked to Hill since the podcast dropped, but when he saw him for the Formula 1 race, everything seemed fine.
“So it’s something where I’m sure he’s trying to show that he loves where he’s at in Miami. He loves his teammates,” Mahomes said. “But at the end of the day, it’s just going out there and playing football. And you kind of let other people talk about who’s the best and all that different type of stuff.”
The quarterback added that the issues Hill seemed to have with Kansas City’s offense were “definitely new in the sense of how it’s seen on the podcast, I guess.”
“Obviously, when you’re the competitor that he is — that’s the thing I loved about Tyreek and I still love, is he wants to win. And I feel like with the coverages that we were getting, defenses were really accounting for him, so we had to go other places,” Mahomes said. “But when he’s a competitor like that, you want to have a chance to impact the game. So I know he wanted to get the ball as much as possible so he could help us win. It wasn’t a selfish thing.
“But it definitely — it didn’t seem — I mean, we were winning football games, especially at the end of the season. So I didn’t think he really kind of brought that to our attention. But now we just kind of move on and we keep going with the guys that we have here and we try to win football games.”
Hill led the 2021 Chiefs with 159 targets, ahead of tight end Travis Kelce, who was second on the club with 134. Hill ended the year with 111 receptions for 1,239 yards with nine touchdowns.