Fresh off his second Super Bowl victory, Patrick Mahomes is a sports phenomenon still in a state of becoming. Sure, he’s ubiquitous in those State Farm ads and has twice won the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Award. But this season will be only Mahomes’s sixth as the starting quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, and he’ll be turning 28 next month—the beginning of his prime, if the careers of previous upper-echelon quarterbacks are anything to go by.
He remains something of a cipher in the public eye, more elusive as a person than either of the Manning brothers, Aaron Rodgers, or Tom Brady. It’s telling that the Chiefs player who was deemed worthy of hosting Saturday Night Live last March was not Mahomes but tight end Travis Kelce, six years his senior and already fully formed as a media-genic crossover star.
