Buffalo Bills fans have seen enough of Patrick Mahomes.
Before the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback left Highmark Stadium with yet another playoff win over their beloved Bills on Sunday, fans pelted Mahomes with snowballs from the stands.
The snowballs started landing as Mahomes ran past the sideline to greet some fans in the stands wearing Chiefs gear. He quickly turned around and was hit with more snowballs as he ran back onto the field.
Mahomes then turned toward the tunnel and dodged more snowballs as he skipped through the Buffalo end zone.
The onslaught didn’t seem to bother him. Mahomes was all smiles after leading the Chiefs to a sixth AFC championship game in six seasons as the team’s starting quarterback. Kansas City won Sunday in a 27-24 thriller in which Mahomes threw for 215 yards and a pair of touchdowns to Travis Kelce.
He wasn’t the only Chiefs player to get hit with snowballs. Linebacker Drue Tranquill apparently was also targeted. He too wasn’t bothered and took the opportunity to chide Bills fans and their snowball throwing prowess.
The pain of Sunday’s loss for the home team was exacerbated by a missed 44-yard field-goal attempt from Tyler Bass that would’ve tied the game with less than two minutes remaining. Instead, the Chiefs walked away with their third playoff win over the Bills in the past four seasons. Mahomes’ Chiefs previously beat Josh Allen’s Bills in the 2020 season’s AFC championship game and the 2021 season’s divisional round.
Buffalo has been inundated by a deluge of snow courtesy of multiple blizzards in recent weeks, which left plenty of snow in the stands for Sunday’s game. That added up to a perfect storm of frustration and opportunity that some Bills fans apparently couldn’t resist.
Bills quarterback Josh Allen has completed six seasons as a starter. He has never been to a Super Bowl. Three times, his team’s effort to get there ended against the Chiefs.
He was asked after Sunday night’s 27-24 loss to explain the frustration of losing yet again in the playoffs to the Chiefs.
“It sucks,” Allen told reporters. “Losing sucks. Losing to them, losing to anybody at home sucks.”
Does it hurt more to have the season end at home, as it has in each of the last two seasons?
“Here, there, it doesn’t matter,” Allen said. “Losing sucks. I don’t know what else to say.”
He also was asked whether small tweaks or significant changes are needed to get over the hump.
“I don’t think it’s a big change,” Allen said. “I think it’s just, again, we’ve got to find a way to score one more point than they do. And every season, if you don’t win, it’s a failed season. That’s the nature of the business. There’s one happy team at the end of the season, really. And when it’s not you and you’re so close, it sucks.”
Change happens every year, to every team. It’s the nature of the modern NFL. As long as the Bills have Allen, they have a chance. They need to figure out what else they can do to put enough around him to finally get back to the Super Bowl, a place they haven’t been in 30 years.
And while it’s still technically a failed season, the Bills should be proud of how they turned it around after the Monday night loss to the Broncos, which sparked the firing of offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey. At that point, major changes seemed to be inevitable. Now, maybe it will just be a tweak here or a tweak there and another shot next year at climbing to the top of the mountain.
