For the fourth time in the last five years, the Buffalo Bills are in the process of navigating an offseason which began with a playoff defeat at the hands of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs – despite having gone 4-0 against them in the regular season during that stretch.
But Bills fans were reenergized when they watched the Chiefs get absolutely stomped by the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX, ending their three-peat bid and bringing them back down to Earth with what was technically their first “meaningful” loss since the Cincinnati Bengals beat them in the AFC Championship Game back in January 2022.
What has given – or at least should be giving – Bills fans additional energy, however, is the false sense of optimism that the second half of the “Big Game” has evidently been generating for Chiefs Kingdom.
The Super Bowl has been deemed Xavier Worthy’s “breakout game”, as he tallied eight catches for 157 yards and two touchdowns.
The Bills had a chance to take Worthy with the No. 28 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, but they traded the pick to the Chiefs. And given their history of trading picks to the Chiefs, specifically the No. 10 selection in 2017, the Chiefs’ selection was always going to be a bit overblown and overanalyzed, especially with regard to Buffalo, regardless of who was taken.
Worthy did not have a terrible rookie season by any stretch, but if Chiefs fans are really expecting his Super Bowl performance to be the norm, Bills fans can only sit back and smile.
By the time the game was 34-0, Worthy had two catches for nine yards. The other six catches, 148 yards, and two touchdowns came in garbage time. The 50-yard touchdown even came after the Gatorade had already been poured on Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni.
Just how misleading was that statline?
Look no further than the statline of Mahomes himself. He was 9-for-18 for 61 yards and two interceptions when the game was 34-0, with his only touchdown being a pick-six to Eagles rookie cornerback Cooper DeJean.
His passer rating was 18.3, lower than the 39.6 rating posted by Chiefs fans all across the country who simply slammed their TV remotes into the carpet during the DeJean touchdown.
Yet Mahomes finished the game 21-for-32 with 257 yards, three touchdowns, and those two interceptions, good for a passer rating of 95.4.
In what was indisputably his worst game since Super Bowl LV, when the Chiefs were similarly flattened by Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his passer rating eclipsed his season totals from both 2023 and 2024 and ranked higher than 11 of his 16 regular season performances during the 2024 season.
For a quarterback as elite as Mahomes is, his worst performance in years was far from worthy, no pun intended, of a 95.4 passer rating. After the game was 34-0, he went 12-for-14 for 196 yards and two touchdowns – good for a perfect passer rating (158.3) – to boost that number.
And the inflated stat-padding session that was the second half for Worthy should be viewed in a similar light, yet Chiefs fans seem to think he is already the second coming of Tyreek Hill.
One of Worthy’s biggest assets is his speed, yet he tallied only three rushes for eight yards during the postseason. And with WR1 Rashee Rice sidelined for much of the season, Worthy did not particularly blossom into a reliable number one target for No. 15.
Worthy did lead all Chiefs wide receivers in receptions and yardage, but with only 59 catches for 638 yards. That put him behind aging tight end Travis Kelce, who caught 97 passes for a career-low 823 yards.
And for a speedster, his 10.8 yards per reception average left a lot to be desired. It ranked only sixth among Chiefs players with more than a dozen catches, even trailing the mark set by backup tight end Noah Gray.
Additionally, among the 22 players with seven or more drops in 2024, Worthy’s catch rate of 60.2% was fourth lowest. He also only eclipsed 50 yards in four games after Rice’s injury.
His only pre-Super Bowl game with more than 100 scrimmage yards ironically came against the Bills in the AFC Championship Game, but even then, 26 of those yards were gifted to him by the folks in black and white stripes on a pass that was clearly incomplete. He had never eclipsed 80 receiving yards in a game before this one.
Even though this ball hit the ground and neither player had complete possession the refs rule that this was a catch by Xavier Worthy. pic.twitter.com/VuCbWzA6tH
— Rate the Refs (@Rate_the_Refs) January 27, 2025
Perhaps Worthy will benefit from having Rice back, and Rice’s return, in and of itself, should make the Chiefs more dangerous on offense after a season in which they only once eclipsed 30 points.
And there is also no doubt that as long as Mahomes is the signal caller in Kansas City, the University of Texas product should have more than enough opportunities to grow and perfect his skillset. But the overreaction to his Super Bowl performance is just that: an overreaction.
Bills fans can only hope that that overconfidence and false sense of optimism carries over into the Chiefs’ 2025 season.