Patrick Mahomes Coors commercial: How did Mahomes get around NFL rules against beer commercials?

A clever workaround to the NFL’s archaic rules regarding players and alcohol is turning heads, as people applaud Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Mahomes recently appeared in a Coors Light commercial — or, at least, he appeared in a Coors-adjacent ad. The persisting NFL rules should have disallowed his recent ad spot, regardless, which leaves quite a few of the 27-year-old‘s fans scratching their heads. The rules could really use to change — after all, do we think our footballers are all sober paragons? — but that doesn’t eliminate their strict enforcement, so how, exactly, did Coors and Mahomes manage to pull their latest ad off?

The Mahomes/Coors workaround

A long-established NFL rule prohibits players from endorsing alcohol products, but Patrick Mahomes has made a habit of side-stepping the NFL’s odd alcohol avoidance. He managed to once again flawlessly maneuver his way around the rule with a recent ad spot for Coors. The ad perfectly avoids any kind of rule breaking with a simple, chef’s kiss-worthy loophole on par with his former rule-dodging Coors commercial from July. Back in July, Mahomes and Coors managed to successfully pull off a Coors Light ad by having the football star promote a literal Coors light. A flashlight, sporting the Coors Light logo, that the company dubs “the Coors Light” and gleefully describes with all the same keywords commonly associated with their popular “adult beverage.”

This time, they found a new, clever way to insert Mahomes into a (technically not beer) ad. Instead of promoting Coors beer, Mahomes is promoting Coors Light bear, a “zero percent adult beverage, 100 percent mammal” mascot for the beer brand. An amusing commercial sees Coors mimic the same style it used in its former ad, and flawlessly promote its beer without ever actually using the word. Instead, it shows Mahomes enjoying a range of activities typically associated with beer drinking — grilling, watching movies, golfing — but with a bear by his side instead. You’ve got to applaud the clever approach.