Patrick Mahomes issued his KC Chiefs teammates a warning. They’re finally listening

Inside the student union of a college dormitory, the quarterback of the NFL’s presumptive favorite summarized a warning shot he’d issued his team over the previous six-plus months.

Patrick Mahomes acknowledged during Chiefs training camp that maneuvers he made in the offseason — even one that grabbed headlines at a celebrity golf tournament — coiled around the same point.

You can’t get too comfortable. The details still matter.

Some 61 days later, standing at a podium inside Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, four games and two losses behind him, Mahomes re-emphasized the message under a different umbrella.

I told you so.

The Chiefs beat the Eagles 42-30 on Sunday, and it seems as though, another suspect defensive performance and all, his teammates have finally heeded his message. The result played out before the 69,796 on hand in Philadelphia, but it was conceived behind closed doors at the Chiefs’ facility in Kansas City.

Mahomes and Reid characterized practice as a different environment after back-to-back losses to the Ravens and Chargers in Weeks 2 and 3. The Chiefs once believed their story would always conclude in their favor, no matter the chapters they sandwiched before it. They had their lost their way, in that sense. Or they’d at least lost what made them so good the past two seasons.

They prepared this past week like every last detail mattered. They prepared with urgency. They prepared, more simply, like Mahomes warned they would need to prepare.

“I don’t know if it affects your performance, but it affects your week of work, I guess you could say,” Mahomes said. “I think you (saw) this last week the urgency that we had (to) get everything done. We need to practice at a certain attitude. You need to go in and work on the little details.

“It’s not complacency, but you lose those little things whenever you’re winning every single week — whenever you can get to the end of the game like, ‘Ah, we’re just going to win the football game; we’ll figure out a way.’ It doesn’t happen like that in the NFL. The NFL will correct you really quick. And we saw that.”

The Chiefs are learning the burden of being among the NFL’s elite teams. The football world expects them to win. Tyreek Hill described Sunday receiving an onslaught of Tweets whenever he doesn’t do what he did Sunday — 11 catches, 186 yards, three touchdowns.

That’s the territory they reside in now.

But they’ve leaned into that, too. Too far into that. Early this season, a confidence become a feeling of being unbeatable.

“In our mind, I feel like we were also there,” Hill said of the outside work thinking the Chiefs will win every week. “The guys in the locker room, we expected to win. That’s the way we play sometimes.

“We just need to do what we did today — come out and be the aggressor.”

And that’s why, on Oct. 3, a win against a mediocre Eagles team will be classified as a step in the right direction. The defense has major holes it’s yet to prove it is capable of correcting. The offense, as Hill even framed it, is still missing a step, though Mahomes threw for five touchdowns and Clyde Edwards-Helaire topped 100 rushing yards. There’s a reason the front office went out and signed receiver Josh Gordon to the practice squad this week.

Beyond the X’s and O’s and scheme and playbook though, the Chiefs’ outing on Sunday — or better yet, their preparation for the outing on Sunday — represents an adjustment in mindset.

“I think we started it,” Mahomes said. “There’s still a long ways to go. This is a long season.

“You don’t win a season at the beginning of October or September. It’s about getting better each and every week.”