Best-laid plans?

 Look, I like Patrick Mahomes. He's the best quarterback in football and an apparently decent human on top of it, and I don't really care if that combination means every time you turn on your TV these days you see him selling something.

You get your face out there too much, people get sick of your face. Fact of life.

Anyway, I like Mahomes despite all that. But ... I have to say, I think the man's shining us on this time.

By now you've seen the slick little behind-the-back pass to Travis Kelce for eight yards and a first down the other day, in a preseason game against Detroit. Mahomes claimed afterward he did it because Kelce ran the wrong route, and Mahomes was pissed at him. So he did something he considered equally flippant.

"Now it's going to be a highlight," Mahomes all but sighed, all but rolling his eyes.

Funny line. But I think a line might have been all it was.

See, I've watched the play at least half-a-dozen times now, and I'm not sure it was all that spontaneous. I've particularly focused on Kelce, who, despite what Mahomes says, looks to be running a designed route. At the very least, he wound up exactly where he needed to be to grab Mahomes' showy little trick. In which case it worked exactly the way it was designed to work.

Or, not. Mahomes being the master of improvisation that he is, it could well have been a spur-of-the-moment deal. It could well have been a "Here, dumbass" bit of cavalier-ness by Patrick to spite Kelce. It might not actually have been something the two of them had been working on in practice.

However ...

However, I suspect it was.

It is Mahomes, after all. And these are the Chiefs of Andy Reid, who's rather fond of trickeration himself. And it was a preseason game, so who cared if it didn't work?

Because it did, Mahomes had to address it. He played it for laughs, of course. It was exactly the sort of thing a guy would say if he didn't want anyone to know the play was anything but spontaneous goofing around in a meaningless game.

Then again, I've always been a suspicious sort prone to conspiracy theories, like why packages of hot dogs and hot dog buns don't match up. So there's that.