Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said he’s trying to learn from a rough second half against the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Championship, calling it the worst playoff football of his career.
“That second half I played, I didn’t play really good football at all. Probably my worst playoff football I’ve played was the second half of the game,” Mahomes said, per Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith. “So I’m just trying to use that as a learning thing that whenever I’m struggling or a team’s struggling, just find a way to get positive plays, because when you have a lead like that, you don’t want to lose that lead.
“We played such a great first half. Even if we weren’t getting what we wanted in the second half, I have to get better at taking what’s there to try to get some points on the board, come away and get to the Super Bowl.”
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Mahomes said in February he was “still not over” the defeat. Chiefs general manager Brett Veach said the loss was “just a bad day to have a bad day, and that’ll sit with us for a long time.”
Tennessee Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill spoke in May about the scar that has formed after more than three months of thinking about his team’s loss to the Bengals in the AFC Divisional Playoff game in January, won 19-16 by the Bengals in Nashville.
“It’s a scar. It’s a deep scar. It was a lot of sleepless nights,” Tannehill told reporters. “Every time I close my eyes, I was rewatching the game in my head. Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep for weeks and weeks after the game.
“I was in a dark place. And it took me a while and a lot of work to get out of it. You know, it wasn’t something that went away easily. And it’s still a scar that I’ll carry with me throughout the rest of my life. … I’ve worked through it. But therapy, talking to people, time helped. It took a lot of work to get through it.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Patrick Mahomes: Loss in AFC title game ‘my worst playoff football’
