Scare Over: MRI Shows No Major Damage to Mahomes' Elbow After Chiefs Rout the Jets 35-12

For a few awful minutes at Arrowhead on Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs' season seemed to hang on the state of Patrick Mahomes' right elbow. By Sunday night, the whole league could breathe again.

The scare came with 1:33 left in the second quarter. Mahomes was winding up to throw downfield when Jets rookie edge rusher David Bailey crashed into his throwing arm on a strip-sack, bending the elbow backwards as the ball came loose. Mahomes stayed down, then walked off clutching his right arm with his left hand, his face telling the story before any trainer reached him. The stadium went quiet. The Chiefs' medical staff checked him on the sideline, he flexed the elbow, threw a couple of warm-up passes, and then did what he almost always does: he went straight back out there without missing an offensive snap.

He did not just survive the rest of the game. He ran it. Mahomes finished 23 of 31 for 242 yards and two touchdowns as Kansas City rolled to a 35-12 win over the Jets, improving to 7-2, and he played most of the second half before giving way to backup Justin Fields to kneel the game out in the closing minutes. His throwing was affected, he admitted afterwards, and the numbers hinted at it too: he averaged just 2.8 air yards per attempt, the second-lowest of his career, as the Chiefs kept things short and safe around him.

"I knew it wasn't ligament-type stuff, it was more muscle-type stuff," Mahomes said after the game, once he could throw the ball again and feel it hold up. "Once I could throw the ball, I knew it wasn't a ligament." Head coach Andy Reid described the injury only as an issue with the "elbow region" and said the quarterback had told the staff his elbow was sore but that he was determined to get back out there.

The real news came a few hours later. Mahomes underwent an MRI on the elbow after the game, and the scan showed no major injury, NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported on Sunday night. The diagnosis is an elbow strain or sprain, and the team will monitor it over the next few days for pain and swelling, but the worst fears — a ligament tear, a long absence — did not come to pass. "If I'm able to play, I'm gonna play," Mahomes said.

The relief will be enormous in Kansas City, and not only because of who Mahomes is. He missed the rest of last season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee last December, and any sight of him down on the turf and holding an arm sends a shiver through the franchise. This time, mercifully, the story ends with a scan that came back clean and a quarterback who never left the field.

There is still work to do. The elbow will be watched through the week, with swelling and soreness to manage before the Chiefs travel to Atlanta to face the Falcons next Sunday. But the win keeps Kansas City firmly in the hunt, and the sight of Mahomes finishing the game he started, throwing touchdowns on a sore arm, said as much about him as the medical report did. The Chiefs got their scare, and then they got their answer.