Was Patrick Mahomes Smiling After The Broncos Beat The Chiefs? You Be The Judge

Not a good look for Mahomes if it turns out to be true.

Things couldn't have gone much worse for the Kansas City Chiefs this season.

After their loss to the Chargers last weekend, KC is set to miss the playoffs for the first time in over a decade. And, to add insult to injury — literally — their star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, went down for the rest of the year and potentially beyond with an ACL tear.

As if that wasn't bad enough, their defeat on Christmas day at the hands of division rival Denver saw some extra spice being added from Mahomes' box in the waning minutes of the game.

With the Chiefs and Broncos tied at 13 apiece late in the fourth quarter, Denver quarterback Bo Nix engineered what would end up being the game-winning drive, capped off by a touchdown pass to running back RJ Harvey in the back of the end zone.

While the play itself was demoralizing for a Chiefs fanbase and organization that was just looking for a little positivity going into the last few games of the season, what happened in the expensive seats of Arrowhead Stadium was even worse.

Is that Patrick Mahomes SMILING in his luxury suite as the Broncos take the lead over his "beloved" Chiefs?!

My first thought when seeing this was surely this is engagement farming and someone had just spliced a clip of Mahomes from earlier in the game. But if you look in the background at the TV in Mahomes' box, you'll see a replay of the touchdown from the broadcast.

That's a super tough look for the Chiefs and their quarterback, but again, he could have been smiling at anything.

It's truly a modern-day Rorschach Test; anyone can see what they want and no one will ever really know what he was smiling at in the moment.

That didn't stop fans from both sides of the aisle weighing in on "Smilegate" all over X.

Between Mahomes and his family and tight end Travis Kelce's relationship with pop star Taylor Swift, the Chiefs are turning into quite the circus, so the last thing they need is another controversy, real or fabricated.

Here's hoping Mahomes' smile/grimace was just gas from the stadium nachos, otherwise Kansas City will have more problems on their hands than just missing the playoffs once in a blue moon.

Written by

Austin Perry is a writer for OutKick and a born and bred Florida Man. He loves his teams (Gators, Panthers, Dolphins, Marlins, Heat, in that order) but never misses an opportunity to self-deprecatingly dunk on any one of them. A self-proclaimed "boomer in a millennial's body," Perry writes about sports, pop-culture, and politics through the cynical lens of a man born 30 years too late. He loves 80's metal, The Sopranos, and is currently taking any and all chicken parm recs.