Drops, threats on path to Super Bowl for K.C.'s Valdes-Scantling - ESPN

MARCELLUS SCANTLING HAD just finished a cigar and was about to turn in when the phone rang. It was almost midnight on a late-autumn Monday in west Florida, and the Scantlings had been up watching the Kansas City Chiefs lose to the Philadelphia Eagles on «Monday Night Football.» Marcellus texted their son, Chiefs receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling, to console him. But then Tahisia Scantling's phone started to buzz.

She's a real estate broker and always feels compelled to answer the phone in case a client needs help. But this caller was not a client. He was furious, because Marquez had dropped a football — a 55-yard pass, with 1:50 to go and Kansas City trailing 21-17. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes hit Valdes-Scantling in stride, in the rain, and Valdes-Scantling bobbled it, dropped it, then fell into the end zone. Mahomes put his hands on his head. Valdes-Scantling looked in the direction of his quarterback and picked himself up. Then some strangers searched the internet, found the closest number to Valdes-Scantling and vented. One person told her to watch her back; in another call, a man strongly encouraged her son to catch the ball.

Tahisia eventually stopped answering and Marcellus eventually went to bed. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

Back in Philadelphia, Valdes-Scantling's direct messages blew up before he even walked off the field.

«I was told to kill myself,» Valdes-Scantling says, «that they were going to kill me. And I got voice memos about how someone was going to shoot me, or how I lost them all this money and they're going to come find me. Everything that you could possibly think of, it was said.»

That Nov. 20 game was emblematic of a receiving corps that led the league in