KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The best throw of Super Bowl LIX didn’t mean a thing. Not really, anyway.

It arrived long after the outcome became obvious, deep into the fourth quarter of a blowout. And it actually came from the arm of the losing quarterback, the one who would arrive at his team’s facility only days later, there to ask his coaches a series of questions that could be summarized rather vaguely:

“How can I get better?”

A sour ending prompted the interaction, Patrick Mahomes left with an offseason to contemplate it. For seven months, this will be unequivocal: His most recent game stunk.

But his most recent throw? A beauty.

On his final attempt of the Super Bowl, Mahomes reared back and let loose a 50-yard touchdown strike to rookie Xavier Worthy, a score that cut the margin to 18 points with less than two minutes to play.

As I said, meaningless, right?

Well, not entirely.

The backdrop for Worthy as a lone bright spot in the Super Bowl — he finished with eight catches, 157 yards and two touchdowns — could carry some weight in 2025, even it carried so little on an early February night in New Orleans.

“He’s not just fast,” Mahomes said. “He can make plays.

“And so my job is to give him more opportunities.”

It’s not just the quantity of the opportunities, though.

It’s the type of them — because Worthy’s rookie year didn’t unfold the way the Chiefs envisioned. Which prompts a question that has hovered over their offseason as they evaluate their offense: What kind of receiver is Xavier Worthy really?

Initially, the speed captured the Chiefs’ attention, same as it did plenty of other teams and same as it would a prime-time TV audience. Worthy was the fastest NFL draft prospect ever recorded, all 165 pounds of him breaking a NFL scouting combine record by completing the 40-yard dash in 4.21 seconds.

The size and speed combination prompted this NFL scouting report from the league website: “Worthy is a niche prospect for teams looking to add a legit field-stretcher.”

A team in Kansas City ventured to fill that niche and revitalize its downfield passing game. But Worthy’s rookie season produced some irony.

He didn’t solve the downfield passing game.

He found his niche in the short game.

Worthy had 59 catches as a rookie, and 53 of them were either within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage or behind the line. (Three were intermediate, and just three were 20-plus yards downfield.)

Worthy was one of PFF’s top-graded receivers on the short throws, yet almost absent from the list of downfield receivers. A 165-pound, blazing fast wide receiver gained most of his yards not through deep passes but rather with his legs after the catch — he finished sixth in the NFL in yards after the catch per reception.

Surprised?

Well, them too.

“We learned that Xavier is more than a deep threat,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “He also has the ability to do (the short passes), and we probably could’ve tapped into that even more, and that’s my fault.”

Reid said that a couple of weeks after the Super Bowl, after I’d asked him to reflect on last season’s lessons. It was one of the initial things he wanted to mention.

“He’s not the biggest guy, but he’s not afraid to run crossing routes,” Reid said. “Sometimes you see those guys, and they tip-toe across, (but) he goes 100 miles an hour.”

That’s a reflection of the past year.

But it’s an illumination of the year to come.

The Chiefs used Worthy initially on downfield routes, asking him to take the top off a defense in hopes of providing more space for the intermediate route-runners such as Rashee Rice and Travis Kelce. He could fly. So why not send him on, well, fly patterns?

But out of need — when Rice suffered a season-ending knee injury in Week 4 — they asked him to diversify his routes. And over his final seven games, Worthy had 39 catches for 392 yards and three touchdowns.

Thus, he’s in organized team activities (OTAs) this summer not just a year wiser — but a year different.

The Chiefs plan to use Worthy more as an unpredictable piece than the sprinter along the sideline.

“We were able to tap into that .. and start showing it the last quarter of the season a little bit,” Reid said. “But I’m not sure we’ve tapped it all out. I think there’s more. And that’s exciting.”

And here’s where the irony could emerge differently now. Follow along the most optimistic outlook for Worthy for a moment, which is of course health-dependent.

After he spent the most productive part of his season operating on underneath routes, it has the potential to re-engage the original purpose.

It’s why that deep pass in the Super Bowl didn’t mean nothing. The Eagles respected his underneath work. They let him pry loose deep, and it wasn’t just the once, nor just the Eagles.

In the regular season, as mentioned, Worthy had three downfield catches in 16 games. That’s it.

In the playoffs, he had four.

“Him displaying that now just opens up a whole other window and really forces defenses to cover him at all three levels,” Chiefs passing game coordinator Joe Bleymaier said, adding, “When defenses have to start taking away all three levels of the field, he can really start selling routes that he’s won and got production on at the second level — and then break back out and run by people.”

The deep passing game will be a talking point again this summer and again this fall in St. Joseph. It won’t just be about Xavier Worthy, because he’s no longer just about those patterns.

But he offered a playoff peek at one of the several layers required to pry himself loose on deep throws.

Excel in the short game, too.

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