Patrick Mahomes: Chiefs' Close Wins 'Keeps You Motivated' amid Super Bowl 59 Pursuit

The Kansas City Chiefs are 11-1 on the season, but their outstanding record has been anything but a cakewalk.

Per ESPN's Adam Teicher, star quarterback Patrick Mahomes thinks the gritty wins help the team stay sharp compared to winning games in dominant fashion week in and week out.

"It keeps you motivated, which I think can be a good thing in the end,'' Mahomes said. "I think sometimes I look back on the year we lost the Super Bowl [during the 2020 season] and we were very dominant throughout the regular season and it's just kind of like you get to this point where you start coasting [because] you're winning games, you're just doing the normal thing. If you look at us last year though, it didn't go the way we wanted it to [during the regular season]. I feel like we just continued to work every single week and we knew we had to get better and we didn't let the details slip and we ended up playing our best football at the end of the year, and so that's the hope is that with all these close finishes, we're getting wins, but it's keeping us hungry so that we can try to continue to get better as the season goes on.''"

The Chiefs started their season by sneaking past the Baltimore Ravens after Isaiah Likely caught Lamar Jackson's potential touchdown pass with his foot barely out of bounds. That stressful ending set the tone for Kansas City's season and the Chiefs have now won nine games by one score or less with six games coming down to the final drive.

In their Black Friday win over the Las Vegas Raiders, the Chiefs forced a fumble in the final moments of the game to escape with a 19-17 win. The week before that, they beat the Carolina Panthers with a field goal.

Mahomes pointed out the 2020 season when the Chiefs coasted through the regular season to finish 14-2 before losing the Super Bowl against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. While Kansas City was able to relax in the fourth quarter more during that season, the team wasn't quite as prepared for adversity when it reached the postseason.

Now, the Chiefs have seen just about everything during the regular season. When a late-game situation inevitably arrives in the postseason, Mahomes and the Chiefs will seemingly be prepared for it.

Until then, they'll look to continue winning games to close out the regular season.