ST. JOSEPH, Mo.—More and more I get this feeling that, years from now, we’ll look back at the first 50 years of the 21st century and think: The two players who stood above all are Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes.
I probably won’t be alive when that judgment is made, and it could be that some other player (Arch Manning? A 12-year-old sixth-grader in Texas now?) will compete with their legacies. Good for them if they do.
The more I watch football and football players, the more I think there’s one trait that separates the great from the very good: will. Brady, of course, was a sicko about will. And Mahomes has a way to go to catch Brady in the will department, but he’s off to a good start. Did you see “Quarterback” on Netflix? The Kansas City playoff game against Jacksonville? Mahomes got his ankle bent grotesquely on a Jaguars pass-rush, grimaced in agony and hobbled off.
“It looked broken,” Andy Reid told me Friday, early morning, in his cinderblock Missouri Western State University dorm room. (Gotta love training camp. Reid’s room looks like a small RA’s quarters, and he loves it.) “I was there, right near where it happened. I saw it. I couldn’t put him back in with that.”
When Mahomes came to the sidelines, Reid told him he was out, and the QB F-bombed him. “No!!! F--- NO! I’m good! F--- no! No way, I’ll do it at halftime!!”
That’s the best moment of the eight-episode “Quarterback” series, Reid putting Chad Henne in a playoff game and forcing Mahomes to the X-ray room. In so many ways it captures just what Mahomes is about. I got seven months to get the ankle right! Get outta the way and lemme play! But it’s not the whole story.
“I saw that,” said Reid of the episode, “and it kinda got cut weird. Yeah, he was pissed. He was mad at the whole situation. I told everybody on the sideline, ‘Just leave him alone,’ and I walked away. I went down to the other end. Had him calm down a little bit. I came back to him and I said, ‘I’m not putting you back in until you go get the thing checked.’
“Remember, I had to live through Donovan McNabb playing on a broken leg in Philadelphia. I wasn’t gonna go through that again with this kid. I love him. But he was so pissed. He was still saying a bunch of F-words. And I said, ‘Okay, you’re not going to play then.’ And I left. The unique part of that, which I did not see, was when I left him he took his cape off and he sprinted up the tunnel to go get it checked. Anyway, he got it checked, he was good, and he went back in. But boy, he did not want to come out of that game.”
More in a bit from St. Joe, including the emerging star Mahomes is about to invent — just the way Brady used to do with his lesser-light receivers.
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There was the famous (infamous?) end to Mahomes’ first season in 2018, when Tom Brady and the Patriots beat KC in OT, 37-31. And the post-game scene when Brady went to find Mahomes to tell him how impressed he was with him. “That was great,” Reid said. “Brady was like, You’re gonna take my place in this thing.”
Amazing to see a “7” next to Mahomes’ name on the team roster here. This is his seventh season, including the mostly redshirt first one behind Alex Smith. As a point of comparison, I totaled Brady’s first five starting seasons and compared them to Mahomes’ five years quarterbacking this team. You might be surprised. I was.
What startled me is the touchdown-to-pick ratio. In 93 games in his first five starting seasons, Mahomes is plus-172. Brady was plus-67 in his first five. That’s stunning. Two provisos there: Brady did get more offensively prolific with age, and Mahomes threw it more than Brady did through five years (five more attempts per game). And there’s the 3-2 Super Bowl edge for Brady. But it’s a race. No one who watches football think it’s impossible for Mahomes to legitimately chase Brady’s record of seven Lombardies. After practice Friday, Mahomes sounded grateful for the target.
“Seven’s a lot, but I’ll strive to get as close as I can,” he said. “To win seven Super Bowls and be in 10 Super Bowls, it’s crazy to even think about, even for me today. The other stats kinda come with it. I knew at Texas Tech, I put up a lot of stats but didn’t win games. When I got to the NFL, I knew I wanted to be a winner [first]. Try to win Super Bowls and give my team the best that I can.”
I haven’t been around Mahomes as much as I was around Brady, but I see these similarities:
- They’re not pigs at the trough. Brady famously left lots of money on the table in his career. He always felt—particularly because he could make millions off the field—that if the Patriots spent to the cap to make the team better, he was fine with taking less. Mahomes’ $45-million-a-year average is great, but in the three seasons since signing that deal, he’s fallen to seventh in the QB pay standings. He told me: “You want to keep the quarterback position and the rest of the skill groups, that salary cap moving. But I want to have a great team around me too. I think it’s just about finding that balance throughout your career and knowing when you need to push it and when you need to get those great players around you so you can win those Super Bowls.” Mahomes is still much better off, overall than Brady was. His $45-million average is 20 percent of this year’s KC cap. When Brady and the Pats went 16-0 in 2007, Brady counted for 6.7 percent of the New England cap.
- They hear what the outside world is saying, and they make decent players play lots better. Both QBs have been helped by all-time tight ends. But they made the best of average wideouts. In New England, when Brady led that comeback from 28-3 to beat Atlanta in the Super Bowl, his big wideouts late in the game were Chris Hogan and Malcolm Mitchell; Brady knew his team was being doubted, and he talked about his lesser teammates as if they were Pro Bowlers. In KC, the team scored more points and won more games in 2022 without Tyreek Hill than they did with him in 2021. Mahomes at different times highlighted and praised Justin Watson and Skyy Moore, and he made them factors. This spring, Moore was tied to his hip in Texas workouts. “I had all the guys down there in Texas for over a month-and-a-half. Skye was at every single workout. I mean, every single one. Wanted to get extra work after every single practice. He has that drive to be great.” First two throws in Friday team periods: Mahomes to Moore, one go route, one seam.
- The will. Brady’s story has been told. Mahomes’ is in process. Watch the NSFW video of the sideline scene after he twisted his ankle. He re-aggravated the ankle near halftime of the Super Bowl, limped off, and proceeded to be better in the second half than the first. For the post-season, playing with a bum ankle for 85 percent of the snaps over three games, Mahomes completed 72 percent of his throws, put up 71 points, went 3-0 and had a rating of 114.7
Reid said: “I haven’t worked with Tom, of course. But I think they both see the big picture — the very big picture. Patrick kind of looks at football with a panoramic shot. He sees the whole thing for everybody. I think that’s unique. He can see where the whole team can go, where he can go, our present, our future. Most people are, when you really cut to the chase, self-centered. Patrick’s team-centered. Listen to him compliment the 12th-string players. That helps a team. And on top of that, he’s a football player.”
Kansas City’s practice Friday morning was a tempo affair. New names, some brand new, all over the offense. With Tyreek Hill, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Mecole Hardman having vanished in the last 17 months, Mahomes still has the omnipresent Travis Kelce to lean on. But on this day every other guy he targeted in the passing game had worn KC red for no more than 1.5 year. Go route to Skyy Moore (round two, 2022), deep out to Marquez Valdes-Scantling (UFA, joined KC in 2022), crosser to Rashee Rice (round two, 2023), fade to Justin Watson (UFA, joined KC in 2022). The faster the better. With Reid’s offense, every skill player’s alive on every play, and Mahomes doesn’t discriminate. My bet: Skyy Moore, more sure-handed and confident this year, breaks through with a big year.
There’s one other thing I saw in camp, and I’ve seen consistently with Mahomes. He loves everything about this life. He handles the attention, understands he has to hug some moms and kiss some babies, loves the challenge of roster-turnover, is so at-one with his coach that his can F-bomb him for five minutes and 90 minutes later hug him with sincerity. He knows he came to the perfect place to chase Tom Brady, even though on draft day he surely had no idea that by season seven he’d seriously be doing it. And he’s competitive. In everything. Even streaming.
“That’s why,” Kelce told me, “You keep seeing him on this slow incline of taking over the world. He’s gonna become even more of an international superstar with the Netflix “Quarterback” doc. He understands how to keep getting better at this game of football and this game of life.”
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.