The routine commences at 6 a.m., a tad earlier some days, Patrick Mahomes walking into the Chiefs facility with a backpack strapped over his shoulder.
He’s always preferred and followed a regimented schedule — every minute of the workday accounted for — and he’s spent the past nine years fine-tuning his own.
The next nine months will follow a much different regimen.
For the player. And a change for the organization, too?
It was a most unusual morning inside the Chiefs facility Wednesday, not because of anything happening here but because of who was not present.
“I got here today,” fourth-year player George Karlaftis said, “and it’s the first time I haven’t seen him or his car here. It was different.”
Mahomes, the loudest voice in the room, is instead in Dallas, where he had successful surgery Monday after the season-ending ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) and LCL (lateral collateral ligament) injuries in his left knee he suffered in late in Sunday’s loss to the Chargers — a result that also eliminated the Chiefs from playoff contention. Mahomes has already embarked on the rehab process in Texas, and plans to return to Kansas City on Friday.
In the interim, he has made a point to remain connected in Kansas City, exchanging text messages with teammates and particularly with backup- turned-sudden-starter Gardner Minshew, who will get a crack at the Titans in Nashville this weekend.
That’s the Mahomes role for now, unusual as it might be — a resource.
But for how long exactly? That’s the most important pivot point now for an organization that will reach several others over the next few months. And that most important item pivots on uncertainty.
Yet so much of what comes next for this organization is dependent on what comes next with this player.
How much can you alter an offensive scheme in need of at least some modifications if the quarterback at the center of your offense isn’t part of its on-field implementation? Will big-picture ideas take a backseat to quick-to-execute tweaks instead?
Do you need to invest more significant resources in a backup quarterback this offseason just in case you might need someone who can keep things afloat for a week, a month or something longer in 2026? Do you turn these next three weeks into an audition for Gardner Minshew to take that job?
How do you shape the skill positions around the quarterback, knowing the proverbial Mahomes offseason minicamp in Texas designed to accelerate chemistry between quarterback and receivers won’t take place in the same fashion?
Those aren’t ancillary questions but rather at the crux of who the Chiefs will be next year, and all of their answers dependent on a separate query: When will we see Mahomes on the field again?
And the answer to that query, by the way...
“Every player is different. Every sport is different. Every position is different,” Chiefs vice president of sports medicine and performance Rick Burkholder said Wednesday. “... (The) ballpark on this thing is nine months. Could be a month or two less (or) a month or two more.”
If that seems like a wide window, you get the very point.
They can’t know. Not yet, anyway. So how, if at all, will that affect the Chiefs and their 2026 plans?
We can’t know. Not yet, anyway. The ramifications for the injury aren’t just the next three weeks. They aren’t just the time he will miss on the field.
It’s what was absent from the facility Wednesday: his presence.
It was obvious when he wasn’t front and center of a team meeting to open the week; that he didn’t call the plays in the huddle during practice; that he didn’t hold the clicker and conduct his no-coach, players-only weekly film meeting with quarterbacks and offensive centers later in the day.
It might too be obvious that he isn’t able to develop timing in whatever plays the Chiefs install in the spring and summer.
The Chiefs and Mahomes can establish goals and target dates and all the optimism in the world — and it’s not exactly a secret all would love to put Week 1 in play — but there must be reality baked into all of it. That reality is, of course, the unknown.
You can do all the homework, and they have. You can dig and research and find another NFL player, even a player at the same position, even one who has suffered a similar injury in the same knee and who even once wore the same uniform: Carson Wentz.
That simply does not guarantee you will find the same timeline.
Those involved do have some optimism, which derives from how Mahomes has handled past injuries. Burkholder mentioned Wednesday that Mahomes “is so in tune with what he does that he does it a little quicker.”
Heck, an hour after the loss Sunday, per head coach Andy Reid, Mahomes was “basically saying, ‘Brace me up. Let me go.’” It’s a peek into how he plans to attack the process, even if we didn’t really need a peek.
