Shortly after the Kansas City Chiefs clinched their Super Bowl victory on Sunday, Brittany Mahomes, the wife of quarterback Patrick Mahomes, ran onto the field.
In a video filmed for her Instagram stories, Brittany screams “We did it!” as confetti rains around her. Another story shows her celebrating with her husband and their daughter, Sterling, each of them kissing the toddler’s cheeks.
Twitter met Brittany’s joy with a collective groan.
“ugh we’re gonna have to listen to Brittany Mahomes for months aren’t we?🤮,” one person tweeted. “83% of Chiefs hatred stems from Brittany Mahomes and that math absolutely checks out,” another person tweeted. “That’s great the Chiefs won, but the world loses due to the fact Brittany Mahomes will NEVER shut her trap! # she’s so insufferable,” someone else said.
As Patrick Mahomes’s NFL career has taken off — the quarterback has now won two Super Bowls in four seasons, and took his team to a third in 2021 — so has the internet’s pure, unadulterated hate for his wife. Brittany Mahomes, née Matthews, has been with her husband since high school, married him last year, and has two children with him. A former college soccer player, Brittany is a co-owner of the Kansas City Current, a women’s team. She often posts about the team and also her own exercise advice to 1.2 million Instagram followers.
Brittany mostly flies under the radar until the NFL season begins. When the Chiefs do well, she soon becomes one of the most memed-about people on the internet. She has been called “embarrassing,” a “banshee,” and worse. On TikTok, haters pair footage of her with equally unpleasant insults.
Many people on the internet also hate the quarterback’s younger brother, Jackson Mahomes, a recent college grad whose antics — dancing behind his brother in post-game interviews and posting “embarrassing” TikToks — have seen him labeled “thirsty ass.” When the Chiefs lost in the playoffs last season, many cheered the “elimination” of Brittany and Jackson. When it was clear the team was headed to the Super Bowl this year, detractors rolled their eyes.
“I love how the internet comes together to dislike Brittany and Jackson Mahomes,” one person tweeted.
Anti-Mahomes content has spilled out of NFL-centric algorithms. When the Chiefs were eliminated in 2022, my TikTok FYP — which is usually full of baby humor and GRWM videos — was suddenly full of people making fun of Brittany Mahomes at an astonishing volume.
In one, a woman pretending to be Brittany is asked, Why do so many hate the Chiefs because of you?
“This is a great question, and the answer is, that I am annoying,” she says.
And while many people equally dole out criticism of both Jackson and Brittany, disapproval of Brittany is usually much more biting and cruel. Snarky comments about her voice, personality, clothes, and appearance tend to have a misogynistic vibe, though just as many women are sharing their opinions about her as men.
That’s probably because Brittany is not the type of football WAG who placidly sits by and smiles on the sidelines in support of her man — in contrast to, say, Olivia Holzmacher, the girlfriend of Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow. Holzmacher posts pretty photos online and smiles for the camera, and the internet does not seem to have any real opinion about her.
Brittany loudly celebrates when the Chiefs do well, and complains equally loudly when they do not, both of which seem to annoy her detractors. In one recent video, she screamed, “Light that shit, baby!” as her father-in-law lit a cigar to celebrate the Chiefs winning in the playoffs. From the sidelines, people call her Patrick Mahomes’s “screaming girlfriend,” and her screams have become a meme.
The consensus seems to be that Brittany does “too much.” Her Instagram persona is characterized by kinetic energy; she often posts multiple times on game days and is a fan of captioning her workout videos with lots of exclamation points. She posts incessantly in the lead-up to big games, demonstrating her hair and makeup routine with her glam squad and posing for multiple photos in Chiefs-colored outfits.
And while many fans show her support on social media, her brashness also draws ire and annoyance. She often livetweets Chiefs games, yelling at the refs and unapologetically celebrating wins. In one maligned incident from the 2022 season, Brittany opened a bottle of champagne after a Chiefs win, hitting spectators below her as they all sat outside in winter temperatures. She received so much hate on social media that she attempted to turn the narrative around by making “Team Brittany” shirts, with the proceeds going to an anti-bullying charity. Her efforts were roundly mocked.
“For societies sake, the Bengals need to win next week,” wrote Barstool Sports on Twitter, in 2022, in reference to a playoff game that season.
The popular sports site is one likely origin of all this disapproval; it has been riding the Mahomes hate train for years, starting with a 2019 article, “Is Patrick Mahomes Girlfriend and His Brother The Two Dumbest Humans On Earth? [sic].”
“Introducing Patrick Mahomes girlfriend and his brother [sic]. The two biggest MORONS on the planet. Both of them running roughshod through Gillette like they own the place,” reads the blog post, written by the site’s founder, Dave Portnoy.
Since then, the website’s “obsession” with hating on both Brittany and Jackson has not abated; even today, there was a post about Jackson “ruining everything.”
The collective censure of Brittany and Jackson seems to stem from an assumption: Relatives of successful, beloved NFL players should never pull focus from the athletes onto themselves. Women, specifically, are usually expected to be quiet, deferent, and placidly supportive — but Brittany is loud, speaks her mind, and shows her emotions. She doesn’t seem to want to change herself despite the fact that everyone seems to want her to. She nabbed Patrick in high school, and now she’s rich — a classic target for sour grapes.
Perhaps the biggest strike against her is that these relentless negative comments never seem to bother her. While she has spoken out against the bullying, she doesn’t really seem to care if people make fun of her. She’s tweeting through it.
“MY BABY DID IT!!!!!” she posted on Twitter at the game’s end on Sunday. And a lot of people actually celebrated right along with her.
“Don’t listen to the hater’s Brittany. They are just sore losers!” one person said. ●