How bottles of champagne helped break the Mahomes contract story

There’s some history for Kansas City Chiefs fans trying to stay one step ahead of the news.

Remember the time fans were convinced that Bill Cowher was returning to the organization to become its head coach because the sister-in-law of a friend who knew someone whose brother’s daughter knew a real-estate agent who had shown Cowher a house in Mission Hills?

Well... it was something like that.

Or the times fans have spotted NFL players on airliners (or at airports) around the country, sparking rumors that Player A was about to end up with Team B? There have even been times when fans have used tracking software to follow aircraft around the country, trying to figure out what was about to go down.

And now we have Katie Camlin, a Chiefs fan who manages Plaza Liquor, which is located on Belleview west of Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. Camlin now occupies a permanent place in Chiefs history after breaking one of the biggest stories in franchise history: quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ new 12-year, $503-million contract extension.

Early on Monday afternoon, Camlin tweeted a piece of news.

Here at Arrowhead Pride, we knew of the tweet within minutes; editor-in-chief Pete Sweeney passed the link to me at 12:27 p.m. But minutes later, it had been deleted. (Enterprising Twitter users had already made screenshots, of course).

Normally, we might not have given Camlin’s tweet much weight. There are many Twitter accounts that attempt to lay claim to breaking news stories — usually by claiming a wild guess (that happened to be right) was based on real information.

But in this case, we already knew that the Mahomes deal could be imminent; that morning, Pete had alerted me that he had seen some indicators over the July 4 weekend that the deal was about to be completed. So Camlin’s tweet — even if it was deleted — was enough for us to begin gearing up for the news.

Within an hour, it was clear the story was about to break.

Grunhard’s tweet was enough for us — and other Chiefs news outlets that probably had the same information — to publish a “teaser” about the situation. At 1:54 p.m., ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter broke the news of the signing.

But back at Plaza Liquor, Camlin’s phone was blowing up. And she had come to realize what had happened.

“I had so many notifications that Twitter was like, ‘Do you want us to filter these?’” Camlin told KSHB-TV late on Monday afternoon.

“I definitely want to put like, ‘In before Adam Schefter’ on like, tattooed on my forehead,” she told KSHB. “It’s crazy.”

Camlin had deleted her original tweet that broke the news simply because she was worried about getting in trouble at work — and also the possibility that it could cause problems for the Chiefs employee who had come into her store.

But by Monday evening, all was well.

Camlin now has more than 5,000 Twitter followers — just in case a future champagne purchase gives her another shot a breaking news story — and a great tale to tell her children and grandchildren.

Way to go, Katie!