There has been a changing of the guard in the AFC. After a two-decade reign by Tom Brady, a new successor has risen. While Brady’s accession came out of nowhere — he was the 199th overall pick in 2000 — his heir apparent was born to take the throne.
The new chief (pun absolutely intended) is, of course, Patrick Mahomes. Through two playoff games, Mahomes has played better than any quarterback in PFF’s database. He’s led his Chiefs to the Super Bowl in just his second season as a starter. If it wasn’t for Dee Ford’s offsides penalty, Mahomes would’ve led the Chiefs to the Super Bowl in his first season.
Mahomes is on the verge of becoming the first player in NFL history to win a Super Bowl and league MVP before the age of 25. He’s approaching the NFL’s greatest heights at a rate we’ve never seen.
Mahomes’ meteoric rise to NFL superstardom was always inevitable. We just didn’t realize it.
Mahomes’ father, Patrick Mahomes Sr., pitched in the MLB for over a decade. During various points in his career, he was teammates with historic talents like Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez. Early on, Mahomes Sr. knew his son was cut from the same cloth (without the PED’s, of course). He told Charles McDonald of the New York Daily News:
“You know, I was coaching him one time and we were playing a game. We were beating the team pretty bad. He came up to me and said, ‘Dad, I’m gonna go up here and hit left handed the next time. I’m gonna hit left handed and I’m also going to hit with a wooden bat.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re up, go do what you do. He hit the first pitch and he hit it over the centerfield fence and I said, ‘Oh, this kid is pretty special.’”
New York Daily News
In high school, Mahomes was a star athlete in three sports: baseball, basketball and football. With a mid-90’s fastball and a near .500 career batting average, Mahomes was actually drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the 2014 MLB draft. On the basketball court, he averaged 19 points and 8 assists per game as a senior.
But Mahomes always shined brightest on the gridiron. He threw for 50 touchdowns and ran for an additional 15 during his senior year. In the Texas high school playoffs, Mahomes made this incredible touchdown run. Look familiar?
His high school dominance led him to Texas Tech, where he played both football and baseball his freshman year. During the Red Raiders’ bowl game in his sophomore season, Mahomes threw for 370 yards and 4 touchdowns against an LSU defense that featured future Pro Bowlers Deion Jones, Jamal Adams and Tre’Davious White. (I’m not even gonna go there.) He was roasting NFL cornerbacks back then, too. (That’s Eagles DB Jalen Mills.)
That performance must’ve stuck with Mahomes, because he ultimately decided to focus on football full-time just a few months later. His father said of his decision “He decided what he wanted to do, so he went all-in”. His father thought he was risking “life-changing money” by going all-in on football. What he, like the rest of us, didn’t realize is that Mahomes was sitting on pocket aces the whole time.
As a junior, Mahomes threw for 5,052 yards in just 12 games, which now ranks 14th all-time. He benefited from Big 12 defenses and Kliff Kingsbury’s Air Raid scheme, but he was still Patrick Mahomes. He threw for 734 yards and 5 touchdowns while rushing for 85 yards and 2 more touchdowns against Baker Mayfield.
Mahomes left college for the NFL after his junior year. He wasn’t the first quarterback taken in his draft class, but we should have known Mahomes was bound for stardom when Andy Reid and the Chiefs traded up for him in the 2017 NFL Draft. (I’m. Not. Gonna. Say. It.)
Reid is one of the best offensive minds in the NFL, both today and in NFL history. No quarterback is ever bad under Reid; if Alex Smith was briefly an MVP candidate, Mahomes was always capable of anything.
By this point, it should come as no surprise to hear that Mahomes’ talent was glaringly evident in the preseason of his rookie year. Sure, it’s the preseason against mostly back-ups, but only a select few quarterbacks can make throws like this:
(Warning: do not read Warren Sharp’s reply to that tweet. It is deeply offensive to myself and Bills’ fans.)
Still, the Chiefs decided to start Smith over Mahomes for the 2017 season. It’s one of the more fascinating “what if” questions in sports today: What if the Chiefs started Mahomes his rookie year?
Mahomes made his NFL debut in Week 17, as the Chiefs rested Smith. By the third play of the game, Mahomes introduced himself as a rare talent with this ridiculous throw. Personally, that was the moment I believed Mahomes was a future star. Later, en route to his first career game-winning drive, he somehow found Sammy Watkins for this first down. Everything about Mahomes’ debut, from the ridiculous throws to the clutch plays down the stretch, was a harbinger of things to come.
That start and a season’s worth of legendary practices was enough to convince Chiefs’ general manager, Brett Veach, of his abilities. The Chiefs traded Smith to Washington shortly after the 2017 season, paving the way for the start of the Mahomes era in Kansas City. At the 2018 NFL Combine, Veach said Mahomes was “one of the best players I’ve ever seen”.
Think about that for a second — Mahomes had only made one career start to that point. In fact, Veach’s infatuation with Mahomes goes back even further. The Chiefs were structuring other players’ contracts to fit around Mahomes’ mega-extension while he was a rookie.
While Kansas City was well aware that Mahomes was a budding Picasso at quarterback, the general public still had not caught on. I managed to snag Mahomes with the last pick in the fourteenth round of my fantasy draft before the 2018 season. That’s 168th overall. We were all such idiots.
(Ironically, I actually selected Jimmy Garoppolo and George Kittle earlier in that draft. In case it wasn’t clear: I won my league that year.)
By Week 2 of the 2018 season, Mahomes’ impending stardom became painfully clear. He set an NFL record for passing touchdowns through three career games with ten, and that was without one in his first career start. He hadn’t even started a single home game and he was already a household name across America.
Mahomes made his Arrowhead Stadium debut in Week 3, against none other than the San Francisco 49ers. Kyle Shanahan might not have Sean McVay’s perfect recall, but I’m pretty sure he remembers what Mahomes did to his Niners that afternoon.
Mahomes went on to throw for 5,097 yards and 50 touchdowns in his breakout season. He took home the league’s Most Valuable Player award at just 23 years old. He led the Chiefs to the AFC Championship Game, where he engineered 31 second-half points and nearly a Super Bowl berth. By this point, everyone knew: Patrick Mahomes had arrived, and he wasn’t going away anytime soon.
When the Chiefs fell behind the Texans 24-0 in the divisional round, it never felt like they were out of it. A Chiefs comeback seemed inevitable. Whether or not the Chiefs win the Super Bowl today, Mahomes will be back. He will retire with multiple rings and multiple MVP’s, as a unanimous, first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but if you’ve been paying attention, it’s really not. Sports media likes to claim every promising young player as a future G.O.A.T., but with Mahomes, it’s accurate.
Mahomes’ greatness has been inevitable his entire life. The surprise is not that he got here so quickly, it’s that we didn’t see it coming years ago.
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