KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Just for the record, Patrick Mahomes didn’t get his iconic mohawk sheared off to purge that 40-22 drubbing by the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.

“I’ve wanted to do it for a while, but it was kind of one of those superstitions,” Mahomes said in a Zoom call with local media as the Chiefs began the first phase of offseason training last month. “(We) kept winning the Super Bowl, which is a good thing, but I (didn’t) want to cut the hair while I was doing it.

“And so I had told everybody during the season that win or lose, if we win three in a row or if we lose, I’m getting the haircut.”

Even so, the reset look on the man who’s become the face of the NFL makes a fine symbol for a broader fresh start — a necessity in sharp contrast to where the Chiefs stood this time last offseason.

A year ago, after all, they were preparing to be honored at the White House and, soon after, readying for their Super Bowl ring ceremony at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Most of all, they were eyeing NFL history with their daunting quest to become the first team to win three straight Super Bowls.

Now, it’s all about redemption as they enter Organized Team Activities (OTAs) starting Tuesday at their training complex.

That comes with a different sort of urgency.

The sort of stuff I now think will make them an irresistible force again.

And in plenty of time to restore the claim to dynasty (and becoming “Public Enemy No. 1”) they had earned by winning three Super Bowls in five seasons and appearing in seven straight AFC championship games.

It’s still stupefying to consider that they’d have played in seven straight Super Bowls if not for two overtime losses in AFC title games, and that stuff doesn’t just evaporate.

The pummeling by the Eagles, though, was enough to leave you (well, me, anyway) wondering then if it was a blip or the abrupt end of an era.

From a distance now, maybe that was an overreaction from the sheer shock of it all.

For one thing, it’s hard not to like what the Chiefs have done in free agency and through the 2025 NFL draft.

And this season’s team still is a direct descendant of one that went 15-2 — and 15-1 in what might be termed varsity games — on its way to becoming the first in the NFL to even reach a Super Bowl after winning back-to-back ones.

While that record was enabled by the spectacle of some befuddling late escapes, it also was achieved despite pivotal offensive injuries and, well, personnel miscalculations.

Those left the Chiefs without two of their presumptive best playmakers (receivers Rashee Rice and Hollywood Brown) most of last season and rendered left tackle a portal of chaos.

As general manager Brett Veach last month considered it all, in fact, he marveled that the Chiefs were 15-2.

Especially since they lost the Super Bowl in the sort of lopsided fashion that might have been more fitting for a team that barely made the postseason.

The sort of lopsided fashion that looms ever after.

“It’s one of those things,” Veach said, “I’ll never get over.”

One way to work through that, of course, is to harness it as motivation.

No doubt Veach has, and is.

And you can be certain the two other pillars of their most essential and influential triumvirate — Mahomes and coach Andy Reid — are siphoning from it in their own particular ways.

To the ever-methodical Reid, the notion of proper preparation might be fundamentally the same as it ever was while he puts things in place for what might be his favorite part of coaching: the proving ground of training camp, epitomized by the cinder blocks underpinning the dorm the team stays in on the Missouri Western campus in St. Joseph.

Still, he seemed to acknowledge that a different sort of problem-solving, or at least puzzle-working, hovers over this particular offseason.

“It’s been fun to go back in and dig in on the season and either come up with new things and/or correct the things that we still like and are bringing back,” he said recently.

If that’s not exactly fire and brimstone coming from Reid, such is the public persona of the fourth-winningest coach in NFL history.

And you can leave it to Mahomes (not to mention Travis Kelce and others) to animate the mundane ... and make the idea of a return to glory a crusade.

Starting with the fact that Mahomes is possessed with the sort of consuming competitive DNA that sets apart the elite of the elites — including the self-awareness to know he needs to be better.

One way to understand that unquenchable mentality is that he’s proven virtually immune even to complacency.

Which is saying something when you’ve got much to be complacent about, including three Super Bowl MVPs and two NFL MVPs.

Part of that burn is being able to concoct inspiration from perceived slights. But it’s also about something far more fundamental and substantial: an innate drive to be the best he can be … and the best there ever was.

That would be too audacious for the ever-tactful Mahomes to say out loud. But in a 2023 interview with The Kansas City Star, Veach said it for him: “I think he wakes up every day with that in mind.”

Given that he has displayed that sort of will even amid remarkable success, you can surmise how he’s feeling in the wake of the wretched loss marked by Mahomes’ own perplexing gaffes.

And here’s what he said when I asked him last month about how it’s driving this offseason:

“I’m pretty motivated anyways. But I think when you get some of those tiring sets or tiring reps that you’re in the workout, you have something in the back of your mind that you’re kind of pushing towards,” he said. “You have that bad taste in your mouth from the last time you stepped on the football field, and you kind of have to hear about it all offseason.

“So it gives you the push that you want to go out there and be better. And show what we’re really about.”

That mindset surely has informed Mahomes’ offseason workouts with longtime personal trainer Bobby Stroupe.

And his approach at the now-annual “Camp Mahomes” with receivers in Texas starting last month.

It also will make for an increasingly intensifying undercurrent as the Chiefs begin the next phases of their offseason through camp, and on into their Sept. 5 opener against the Chargers in Brazil.

On the surface, it’s all an entirely different scenario — and look — than it was a year ago.

Beneath that, though, it’s all the same, only more so — driven not by the hunt for the unprecedented, but for vindication and validation.

©2025 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.