Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs trying to balance fun and championship drive

There should be no doubting that Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs have a championship spirit.

They've won back-to-back Super Bowls as well as three of the last five. They now enter training camp in 2024 trying to be the first team in NFL history to three-peat. In fact, even just making the Super Bowl this season would be historic, as no team has won back-to-back Super Bowls before making it back to the Super Bowl the following season.

That's a lot of pressure, but if there's a team can do it, it's this Chiefs squad.

So what's the focus heading into training camp? According to Mahomes, Kansas City still hasn't even reached its peak — especially offensively.

"It's time to get better," he said, per ESPN . "Every season starts differently. You've got to come in with that same mentality you had the year before, even with a higher intensity and even though we won the Super Bowl last year, we felt like we didn't play our best football, especially offensively. So it's our goal to be better that way and coming in with that mentality every single day."

While another Super Bowl is the ultimate goal, it does sound like Mahomes, at least, wants to try to enjoy the ride as well. After all, they do say it's the journey, not the destination, that matters most in the end.

"The end result [last season] was awesome, but I think a lot of us still have a weird feeling in our mouth," Mahomes explained. "... It wasn't fun every single week having to try to just continue to get better and better and the results not paying off the way you wanted to. It wasn't a lot of fun. We have a lot of those same guys back and they know how that felt and so we're going to try to prepare ourselves better this year so that we can play better throughout the season and obviously try to end with the same result.''

Kansas City's three-peat bid starts in Week 1 on Thursday, Sept. 5, against the Baltimore Ravens.