MIAMI — Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt reiterated his hope on Tuesday that Patrick Mahomes will spend the rest of his career in Kansas City, and says the right time to get an extension done is coming soon.
“There will be a right time sometime in the next 12 to 15 months to extend Patrick, and when I say right time it will be right time both for the player and the club,” Hunt said. “I don't want to say it necessarily has to be this offseason but I will say that it's a priority to get it done.”
The parameters for a contract extension for Mahomes remain unknown, but it's believed Mahomes and his camp are seeking to make the quarterback the league's first player with a $200 million contract worth more than $40 million per season. The Chiefs don't appear frightened of the number, but Hunt said there are factors that could impact the timing.
Hunt said the negotiations on the league's new collective bargaining agreement could be one of those issues. The current agreement expires after the 2020 season.
“There are certain mechanism in the CBA in the last year of the deal that make it harder to do certain types of contracts,” Hunt said. “I'm not sure those will have an impact on Patrick's situation or not but there are those kind of things that have to be accounted for.”
The popularity of Mahomes continued rising even before the Super Bowl run. The quarterback topped the NFL Players Associations' most recent sales list for licensed merchandise, and Mahomes will likely end the season as league's most popular player in terms of sales.
Hunt said he had nearly as many Super Bowl Opening Night media requests from outlets based in Mexico as from domestic media, a fact he credits to Mahomes.
“That was something I really didn't anticipate and it was clearly a by-product of the fact that we had played in Mexico and also the fact that Patrick Mahomes is our quarterback,” Hunt said. “There's a lot of excitement for Patrick in Mexico now. I think when you have a player like him and you're playing in high-profile games it definitely grows the business from every metric.”
