Rob Maaddi
Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and the Kansas City football team are back-to-back Super Bowl champions.

Mahomes threw a 3-yard touchdown pass to Mecole Hardman with 3 seconds left in overtime, and his team rallied to beat the San Francisco 49ers 25-22 on Sunday, becoming the first repeat Super Bowl champs in 19 years and ninth overall.

With pop star Taylor Swift watching boyfriend Kelce from a suite, the Kansas City team captured their third title in five years and firmly established themselves as a dynasty.

The NFL’s first Super Bowl in Las Vegas was a sloppy, mistake-filled affair that was mostly boring until the back-and-forth fourth quarter and OT. It was the second of 58 Super Bowls to be tied after regulation, and the first played under new overtime rules under which both teams got the ball.

The Kansas City team trailed 22-19 after Jake Moody kicked a 27-yard field goal on the first possession of overtime, but Mahomes rallied his team, completing another impressive comeback in a rematch of a Super Bowl four years ago.

Mahomes ran 8 yards on fourth-and-1 to keep his team’s chances alive and then scrambled 19 yards to set up the winning score.

After he connected with a wide-open Hardman, the Kansas City team ran on the field as red-and-yellow confetti fell on the turf.

The most excitement in the first half came when a frustrated Kelce bumped Andy Reid on the sideline, knocking his team’s 65-year-old coach a few steps back after teammate Isiah Pacheco fumbled inside the red zone during the second quarter.

The action picked up after a crucial blunder by San Francisco’s special teams set up Mahomes’ 16-yard TD pass to Marquez Valdes-Scantling for a 13-10 lead.

Brock Purdy and the 49ers answered but they couldn’t make enough plays, denying Mr. Irrelevant an opportunity to go from last pick in the 2022 NFL draft to Super Bowl champion.

Mahomes and Reid are now halfway to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, who won six championships in 20 years together with the New England Patriots and were the most recent team to go back-to-back following the 2003-04 seasons.

The 28-year-old Mahomes becomes the fourth starting QB to win three Super Bowls — joining Brady, Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw and Troy Aikman — and second-youngest.

‘Stop the chop’

Earlier on Sunday, as fans made their way into Allegiant Stadium, around a dozen Native protesters chanted a call-and-response: “What do we want? Change the name. When do we want it? Now.”

For the fourth time in the past five years, Natives protested the Kansas City team’s name outside the stadium where the team played in the NFL championship game. Around a dozen protesters – several wearing ribbon skirts – gathered before barricades as fans looked on.

Many carried signs that read: “Your chop is synchronized racism.” “Change the name.” “Taylor Swift doesn’t do the tomahawk chop. Be like Taylor.”

Gaylene Crouser, director of the Kansas City Indian Center, told ICT recently that while she is opposed to the Kansas City team’s name, she is more frustrated by the team’s tolerance of offensive behavior by fans during games.

She said she particularly hates “the chop” – the closed fist gesture that fans perform to the sound of rhythmic drumming that elicits old stereotypes of Native Americans – as well as the Native headdresses that fans still wear, despite the team banning them from Arrowhead Stadium.

Rhonda LeValdo, founder of Not In Our Honor, an organization opposed to the Kansas City team’s name and associated imagery, told ICT recently that protesters planned to express opposition to the San Francisco team’s name.

The 49ers name refers to the gold miners who flooded California the year after gold was discovered in 1848. The ensuing gold rush brought as many as 300,000 settlers to the state and led to a massive decline of Indigenous people from California as a result of disease, relocation and massacres. From a population of 150,000 before the gold rush, just 31,000 Native people remained in the state by 1870, according to the International Indian Treaty Council.

“I was calling it the Genocide Bowl,” said LeValdo, who participated in Sunday’s protest outside Allegiant Stadium. “It’s so weird how Americans celebrate their teams with this. They’re not understanding the history or historical aspects that we as Natives understand.”

This article includes reporting from ICT’s Kevin Abourezk.

Rhonda LeValdo is a board member of IndiJ Public Media, the parent company that owns ICT.