Patrick Mahomes wears same unwashed underwear every game for 7 years, and we have questions

Greatness comes from many places. Sometimes it’s a crusty old pair of underwear. This week former Chiefs quarterback Chad Henne explained what it was like to share a locker room with Patrick Mahomes, giving us new details about what makes the QB tick.

Henne appeared on a podcast with Adam Schefter on ESPN earlier this year and included a pretty wild anecdote about Mahomes’ underwear superstition.

Henne said Mahomes is also particular about his underwear and always wears the same pair [...]
“So he signs this half a billion dollar contract and he’s still wearing the same pair of underwear throughout his entire career?” Schefter said.
“Only on Sundays,” Henne replied.

Okay, so we can math this out and do some underwear science. If we take Henne at his word that Mahomes has worn the same pair of jocks every game of his career it means that between the regular season, playoffs and Super Bowl he’s worn the underpants a total of 103 times.

It’s safe to say a lucky pair of underpants like this would be protected, so let’s assume that Mahomes doesn’t wear his underpants to the stadium, and takes them off following the game. We’ll add an hour on for pre-game prep, and an hour after each game for his media responsibilities.

Combing through Mahomes’ career game logs we see that the average length of game the Chiefs have played with Pat at quarterback is 3:04. Each Sunday this means he’s wearing the underwear for just over five hours every week.

If we calculate in Super Bowl halftime shows and general pomp and circumstance into his underwear habits we have a total wear time of 19,152 minutes — or 13.3 DAYS of continuous wear without washing.

Everyone’s habits are different, but it’s generally accepted that a pair of underwear should be worn for no more than 16 hours before washing — with the expectation they should be washed more frequently if you’re sweating in them (as Mahomes is doing). So basically his crusty jocks are an incredible petrie dish of yeast, E. Coli and Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

I’m sorry for this next part, but we have to discuss it. A 2019 Canadian study on underwear found that the average adult undergarment contains 1/10th of a gram of fecal matter after a single wear. I’m not going to assume Mahomes has pooped in his underwear more than most, though it would be fair to assume when you get hit by an NFL lineman on the regular.

Still, if we take his fecal matter quotient as the adult baseline and work off a standard 16 hour day of wear we can deduct that Mahomes’ underpants have TWO GRAMS of poop mashed into them, dating back to 2017.

Enjoy your lunch. Have a great day.