For the first time since 2017, the Kansas City Chiefs, the reigning dynasty of the NFL, find themselves at an unfamiliar and deeply uncomfortable place: hovering at a 50/50 record late in the season. With three losses in their last four games, the air around the team is thick with anxiety, giving way to an intense and explosive debate that has split the sports world. The question is no longer if the Chiefs are in trouble, but who is to blame, and whether their legendary quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, is at risk of becoming the ultimate scapegoat for an organizational failure.

The discussion, which played out on the nation’s top sports debate platform, “First Take,” quickly spiraled from a clinical analysis of team performance into a volcanic, personal confrontation. At the heart of the matter lies a terrifying, if unlikely, scenario: What if the Chiefs, who have not missed the postseason since 2014, actually fail to qualify for the playoffs? For one analyst, former NFL player Jeff Saturday, the answer is clear: the perception of Patrick Mahomes would, and should, change. For another, the response was one of sheer, unadulterated outrage.

The Alarming Slide and The Damning Numbers

The Chiefs are currently sitting at a precarious 41% chance to make the playoffs, a number that would plummet to a harrowing 14% with a loss in their upcoming match against the surging Texans. What makes this predicament particularly damning is the fact that Kansas City is still favored to win in each of their five remaining games, possessing the fourth-easiest remaining schedule in the league, according to ESPN analytics.

This is the central paradox: A team that is statistically supposed to win is actively failing to do so.

“If we don’t get in the playoffs, that means we are on a slide as a football team,” Saturday argued. The expectation surrounding Mahomes has always been that he is the ultimate antidote—the player who can consistently drag his team to victory regardless of surrounding personnel or circumstance. For years, he lived up to this superhuman standard. Now, as the team falters, the narrative of his infallible nature is being tested in the crucible of accountability.

The Case for Culpability: Why Mahomes Isn’t Blameless

Jeff Saturday’s argument, while acknowledging Mahomes’s remarkable, unprecedented career trajectory, focused on the tangible mistakes that have contributed to the recent skid.

“We can’t act like that he hasn’t been part of the issues that have happened with the Chiefs,” Saturday asserted. He highlighted the uncharacteristic errors that have crept into the quarterback’s game, specifically pointing to an increase in late-game interceptions and uncharacteristic plays that fans have grown accustomed to dismissing as an anomaly. While Saturday conceded that the offensive line performance, lack of a consistent run game, and other structural issues are contributing reasons for the struggles, he refused to label them as excuses that absolve the quarterback entirely.

The core of Saturday’s concern rests on the shock of the “spiral.” A team of this caliber, led by a player unanimously regarded as the best in the sport, should not be heading toward a potential non-playoff finish, especially when they are favored to win their final games.

“If they did miss the playoffs, it would make me look at Patrick Mahomes differently because I just wouldn’t expect a player in the prime with the… we got Rice, we got Worthy, we got Kelce,” Saturday stated, listing the weapons that should, on paper, make this offense dominant. His point wasn’t that Mahomes is suddenly a bad player, but that his inability to overcome the team’s current flaws, given his talent and the talent around him, violates the very definition of the “Mahomes Exception” everyone had come to accept.

The Team Defense: The Shield of the Supporting Cast

Saturday’s initial argument was immediately met with a fierce counter-defense from his co-hosts, who swiftly pointed out the fundamental nature of football: it is a team game.

The co-host forcefully pivoted the focus away from the quarterback’s individual errors and onto the collective failures of the supporting cast. They recalled a critical moment in the Cowboys game where a perfect pass to Rashee Rice on third down was dropped right into his hands, a mistake Mahomes is powerless to fix. Furthermore, they pointed to the defense, which in that same game, allowed the Cowboys to hang a staggering 31 points. A quarterback can throw for over 200 yards and four touchdowns with no interceptions—as Mahomes did—and still lose if the defense and other offensive players fail to execute.

The argument shifted from individual accountability to organizational attrition. Successive, grueling postseason runs since 2018 have taken their toll, placing the Kansas City squad at a critical “inflection point” where they may be forced to “retool the core of players” in order to maintain their customary level of contention. This perspective frames the current crisis as a systemic, structural issue of a dynasty nearing the end of its first golden era, not a failure of the undisputed leader.

Stephen A. Smith’s Volcanic Eruption: “You Should Be Ashamed!”

The debate reached its fever pitch with the introduction of Stephen A. Smith, who did not mince words—he threw gasoline on the fire. His response to Saturday was not merely a disagreement; it was a character assassination of the opposing argument.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Oh my God, you should be ashamed,” Smith thundered, his voice rising in disbelief. He accused Saturday, a former player himself, of betraying the “NFL fraternity” and failing to show the necessary protection and reverence for a player of Mahomes’s stature and consistency.

Smith launched into a rapid-fire enumeration of Patrick Mahomes’s achievements—a veritable tidal wave of excellence that, in Smith’s view, should completely insulate the quarterback from any significant level of criticism after a mere seven years of professional play. The list was staggering:

Seven consecutive trips to the AFC Championship game.

Five Super Bowl appearances.

Three Super Bowl victories.

Three Super Bowl MVP Awards.

Seventeen postseason wins.

Two Regular Season MVPs.

Seven consecutive AFC West titles.

“Because the offensive line is suspect, Xavier Worthy gets hurt early, Rashee Rice gets suspended… He’s playing hero ball, he’s out there, he’s making mistakes at times, there’s no doubt about that, he’s not blameless, I’m not trying to say that he isn’t,” Smith admitted, yet his concession was buried under a fierce torrent of mitigating circumstances. He also pointed a finger squarely at Head Coach Andy Reid, recalling the “annihilation” suffered in a prior Super Bowl loss where Reid “looked as ill-prepared as he has ever looked in his coaching career.”

For Stephen A. Smith, the weight of Mahomes’s legacy means that if the Chiefs fail, the blame must land on the organization, the coaching, the depth chart, and injuries—essentially, anywhere but the man who has delivered the franchise’s greatest era. He even implied a level of bias, challenging Saturday: “If this was Daniel Jones in an Indianapolis coach uniform, Jeff Saturday wouldn’t have said that.” The emotional defense was a testament to how deeply entrenched the belief in Mahomes’s unique status is within the sports media establishment.

The Unbearable Weight of Expectation

This entire debate is less about the Chiefs’ current record and more about the historical weight of expectation. Mahomes has been anointed as the greatest quarterback of the post-Tom Brady era, and arguably a top-five player of all time. When a player reaches this celestial level, the standard for success is no longer merely making the playoffs—it is winning the Super Bowl.

Saturday pointed out that even legendary figures like Peyton Manning were subjected to similar brutal scrutiny before they secured their championships. Manning was “torched” for his playoff shortcomings until he could finally win. The lesson is that the moment an athlete attains the title of “the best,” they are stripped of the luxury of a team failure; every loss, every spiraling season, becomes a referendum on them.

The question facing the sports world, then, is whether the rules of accountability change for transcendent talent. Is Mahomes so great that he can never be criticized for an organizational failure, or is his greatness the very reason he must take the most painful blow of all?

The Chiefs are favored to beat the Texans by three and a half points. Yet, the outcome of that game will do more than affect their playoff odds; it will determine whether this intense, public schism over accountability deepens. Should they lose, the calls for systemic change will grow louder, and Patrick Mahomes, the generational talent who redefined what was possible for a quarterback, will find himself confronting the one narrative he has successfully avoided for seven years: the hero who couldn’t overcome. It is a frightening and fascinating study in pressure, legacy, and the unbearable weight of near-perfection. The world will be watching to see if the golden era’s slight erosion becomes a catastrophic collapse, and who is ultimately left standing in the ruins to accept the blame.