The Kansas City Chiefs won back-to-back Super Bowls on Sunday night in Las Vegas, becoming the first team to accomplish that feat since the New England Patriots pulled it off 20 years ago.
At the center of it all, per usual, were Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, as the star quarterback and tight end duo won their third championship together, with Mahomes throwing for 333 yards and two touchdowns, while also leading the team with 66 rushing yards, and Kelce hauled in 9 catches for 93 yards, coming up big down the stretch after a quiet first half.
The overtime win over the Niners wasn’t without drama, as one would expect from a game that needed an extra 10 minutes to decide, and the first half was decidedly not going in the way the Chiefs wanted. Kelce caught the first pass of the game for one yard on a screen and then didn’t get another reception the entire half. Mahomes struggled to move the ball, and on their best drive of the half, Isiah Pacheco put the ball on the ground in the red zone to give the ball back to San Francisco.
After that fumble, frustrations boiled over on the KC sideline as Kelce, who wasn’t in to block on the play, was irate with Andy Reid and ran up on his longtime coach screaming at him and bumped him before being pulled away by teammates.
Travis Kelce looked less than enthused pic.twitter.com/yncKhjtNl4
— NFL on CBS
(@NFLonCBS) February 12, 2024
Ultimately, that could become a moment the Chiefs looked back on and laugh. Kelce was asked about it while joining Chris Berman and Booger McFarland on ESPN’s NFL Primetime postgame show, and dodged it as best he could, first joking “you saw that?” before deciding to simply say “I was telling him how much I loved him.”
“Imma keep it between us … I was just telling him how much I love him.”
—Travis Kelce on the in-game interaction with Andy Reid pic.twitter.com/oKGkJfGhWc
— ESPN (@espn) February 12, 2024
As Kelce notes, his mic’d up commentary might spoil his efforts at keeping that conversation between him and Reid, but it was clear they weren’t seeing eye-to-eye at that moment. Reid was willing to divulge a bit more, confirming it was about not being on the field, but said he gets Kelce and then joked about how bad his balance was to almost fall over from that bump.
“He just wants to be on the field, and he wants to play. So, there’s nobody I get better than I get him. He’s a competitive kid and he loves to play and he makes me feel young. But my balance is terrible, Booger.”
As tends to happen with this Chiefs team, they managed to figure out the right adjustments to make and found a way to get Kelce more involved in the second half, which usually is a recipe for success, and pulled off another comeback win over the Niners in the Super Bowl.