Patrick Mahomes

#1Professional sports never felt distant to Patrick Mahomes.

#2His father, Pat Mahomes Sr., pitched in Major League Baseball for 11 seasons, so Patrick spent part of his childhood around clubhouses, batting cages, and big-league players. He saw what professionals looked like long before the stadium lights came on: the routines, the repetition, the hours that disappeared behind a few seconds of action.

#3Baseball also seemed like the obvious future.

#4Patrick was genuinely good enough for one. In high school he threw a no-hitter with 16 strikeouts and had a fastball in the low 90s. The Detroit Tigers selected him in the 37th round of the 2014 MLB Draft.

#5Football was almost the extra sport.

#6At one point, his father even wondered whether Patrick should give it up. Baseball and basketball already showed obvious promise, and football added another way to get hurt.

#7Patrick didn’t make a dramatic choice between the two at first. When he went to Texas Tech, the plan was to play both football and baseball.

#8Then the football part got much more serious.

#9Starting quarterback Davis Webb was injured during Patrick’s freshman season, opening playing time for the young backup. By the final game against Baylor, Mahomes was throwing for 598 yards and six touchdowns.

#10Texas Tech lost 48–46.

#11For Mahomes, though, the game showed him something bigger than the score. Quarterback wasn’t just another thing he could do. It was something he wanted to keep doing.

#12After football season, he wanted to walk away from baseball immediately.

#13His mother, Randi Mahomes, wouldn’t let him.

#14He had already committed to playing a baseball season, she told him. He needed to finish what he had agreed to do.

#15So he did.

#16Then he chose football.

#17But baseball didn’t disappear when he left the diamond.

#18A baseball player doesn’t always throw from a clean, balanced platform. The body is moving. The arm angle changes. Sometimes the throw has to come from the side, on the run, or from a position that would look wrong in a quarterback drill.

#19Those movements stayed with Mahomes.

#20Years later, NFL fans would watch him throw while falling sideways, flick passes from strange arm slots, and deliver accurate balls even when his feet looked completely wrong.

#21He had left baseball.

#22He had also brought part of it with him.

#23By the 2017 NFL Draft, nobody needed to be convinced that Mahomes had a special arm.

#24That wasn’t the debate.

#25The debate was everything around it.

#26His footwork could be messy. His mechanics were unconventional. He attempted throws that looked brilliant when they worked and reckless when they didn’t. He had played in Texas Tech’s Air Raid offense, which raised the usual question for college quarterbacks coming from that system: could he process an NFL playbook and NFL defenses quickly enough?

#27Mahomes wasn’t even the first quarterback selected that year.

#28Mitchell Trubisky went second overall.

#29Mahomes was still available.

#30Inside the Kansas City Chiefs, one of his strongest advocates had been Brett Veach.

#31Veach wasn’t the first Chiefs scout ever to lay eyes on Mahomes, but he became one of the people inside the building most convinced that Kansas City should pursue him. He kept bringing Mahomes up to Andy Reid and the rest of the organization.

#32The Chiefs didn’t solve their uncertainty by pretending the problems weren’t there.

#33They brought Mahomes in and spent hours testing him.

#34Could he absorb complicated football information?

#35Could he learn quickly?

#36Would his attention fade?

#37Was there enough underneath the spectacular throws to build an NFL quarterback?

#38That distinction mattered.

#39Kansas City didn’t have to decide whether Mahomes had weaknesses.

#40He clearly did.

#41The real question was whether the weaknesses were teachable.

#42Footwork could be coached.

#43Terminology could be learned.

#44NFL coverage recognition could improve.

#45But a coach couldn’t simply manufacture the kind of arm talent Mahomes had. Nor could one easily teach a quarterback to see a throw after a play had already broken down.

#46The Chiefs also had something many teams drafting a quarterback did not.

#47They had Alex Smith.

#48There was no need to throw Mahomes into the starting lineup immediately.

#49So Kansas City made one of the biggest moves of that draft.

#50The Chiefs owned the 27th pick. They sent Buffalo that selection, the 91st pick, and their 2018 first-rounder to move all the way to No. 10.

#51Then they drafted Patrick Mahomes.

#52After paying that much to get him, they did something that would become just as important.

#53They barely played him.

#54Alex Smith wasn’t hanging on to the Chiefs job because the team had no better option.

#55He was playing extremely well.

#56In 2017, Smith threw for 4,042 yards, 26 touchdowns, and only five interceptions. He made the Pro Bowl.

#57Mahomes spent the first 15 games watching him.

#58Smith understood what the situation meant.

#59Teams don’t trade a future first-round pick to move up 17 spots for a quarterback with no intention of eventually playing him.

#60Mahomes could become the man who took his job.

#61Andy Reid did not order Smith to train his replacement.

#62Smith helped him anyway.

#63Mahomes began following the way Smith prepared for an NFL week. He learned how Smith divided film study into situations: red zone, third down, blitzes, the opponent’s secondary. He saw how a veteran quarterback constructed an answer before Sunday rather than trying to invent everything at the line of scrimmage.

#64Smith also gave Mahomes something more personal: a warning from his own career.

#65When Smith was younger, coaches had drilled footwork into him so relentlessly that he sometimes found himself thinking about his feet during games.

#66That was a problem.

#67If a quarterback is thinking about his steps, he may stop seeing the defense.

#68So Smith’s lesson to Mahomes wasn’t that fundamentals didn’t matter.

#69They did.

#70Practice them.

#71Build them.

#72But when the game starts, see the field.

#73Use your eyes.

#74That was particularly useful advice for a quarterback whose feet would never look perfectly conventional.

#75Smith welcomed Mahomes away from the facility too, inviting him and Brittany over and helping him understand the life around the job, not just the job itself.

#76Mahomes finally started in Week 17 against Denver.

#77His line wasn’t historic.

#7822 completions on 35 attempts.

#79284 yards.

#80No touchdown passes.

#81One interception.

#82Kansas City still won 27–24 after Mahomes helped move the offense into position for the deciding field goal.

#83That was the only regular-season start of his rookie year.

#84Then the Chiefs traded Smith to Washington.

#85Kansas City was turning the offense over to a 22-year-old quarterback who had started one NFL game.

#86To the rest of the league, Mahomes seemed to appear all at once.

#87In 2018, his first full season as a starter, he threw for 5,097 yards.

#88Then there was the number everybody remembered.

#8950 touchdown passes.

#90Mahomes won NFL MVP.

#91The throws looked new. He escaped pressure and launched passes across his body. He changed arm angles as if he were an infielder. Plays that appeared dead somehow kept going for another three seconds, and three seconds was enough for something absurd to happen.

#92But the explosion hadn’t really begun in 2018.

#93It had been assembled during the year when almost nobody saw him play.

#94The raw arm was already there.

#95So was the improvisation.

#96Now Alex Smith’s preparation had been added to it. NFL coverage recognition had been added to it. Andy Reid’s offense had been added to it.

#97And Reid made one of the most important choices of Mahomes’s career.

#98He did not try to coach all the weirdness out of him.

#99Yes, the Chiefs worked on his feet.

#100Yes, Mahomes had to learn the language of the offense.

#101Yes, bad decisions still had to be corrected.

#102But Reid was willing to let him test the boundaries.

#103If a practice interception taught him something, that was useful. The problem wasn’t attempting something difficult once and discovering it didn’t work. The problem was failing to learn from it.

#104Mahomes was being taught how to function inside NFL structure without becoming trapped by it.

#105Kansas City did not give him his extraordinary arm.

#106It built an environment where that arm could survive.

#107And for a while, defenses had no real answer.

#108Then they started studying him.

#109Mahomes reached the Super Bowl quickly.

#110In Super Bowl LIV, Kansas City trailed San Francisco 20–10 in the fourth quarter. Mahomes had already thrown two interceptions.

#111It was exactly the kind of moment when an aggressive quarterback could start trying to fix everything with one throw.

#112Instead, a lesson from his father resurfaced.

#113Pat Mahomes Sr. had spent years pitching professionally. A pitcher can’t carry one bad pitch into the next one. Keep thinking about the mistake and another mistake usually follows.

#114The job is the next pitch.

#115For Patrick, it became the next play.

#116Kansas City scored touchdowns on three straight possessions and won 31–20.

#117It was Mahomes’s first Super Bowl championship.

#118A year later, the Chiefs went back.

#119This time they were flattened.

#120Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat Kansas City 31–9.

#121The Chiefs’ offensive line was badly compromised by injuries, and Tampa Bay could pressure Mahomes with relatively few rushers. That meant more defenders could stay in coverage.

#122Mahomes spent much of the night running backward, sideways, anywhere he could find space, trying to create something impossible.

#123For once, the impossible throws didn’t save them.

#124Kansas City rebuilt much of the offensive line afterward.

#125But the league was also beginning to attack Mahomes in another way.

#126Stop giving him the deep ball.

#127Defenses increasingly kept safeties deep, protecting the part of the field where Mahomes and Tyreek Hill had been most destructive. The message was almost insulting in its simplicity.

#128Take the short pass.

#129Again.

#130And again.

#131And again.

#132If you want a touchdown, put together a long drive without getting impatient.

#133Early on, Mahomes still wanted the bigger answer.

#134In 2021, his interceptions rose.

#135Then came the AFC Championship Game against Cincinnati.

#136Kansas City led 21–3.

#137Cincinnati adjusted its coverage, crowded the deeper areas, and forced Mahomes to keep working underneath.

#138The Chiefs offense stalled.

#139The game reached overtime.

#140Mahomes threw an interception.

#141Kansas City lost 27–24.

#142The league had learned something important.

#143Mahomes’s greatest strength could still tempt him into unnecessary difficulty.

#144Now he had to change too.

#145In 2022, Kansas City traded Tyreek Hill to Miami.

#146For the early Mahomes Chiefs, Hill had been the ultimate threat.

#147He could run past a defense so quickly that safeties had to respect the deepest part of the field before the ball was even snapped. And when Mahomes escaped the pocket, Hill could turn one improvised throw into a touchdown from almost anywhere.

#148Then he was gone.

#149It looked like the obvious moment for the Chiefs offense to decline.

#150Instead, Mahomes became less dependent on one kind of football.

#151He started taking more of what defenses offered.

#152If the easy completion was underneath, he threw underneath.

#153If 40 yards weren’t available, he took seven.

#154He worked through the whole progression more consistently rather than expecting Hill or Travis Kelce to rescue the play.

#155Mahomes later said that losing Hill forced him to become a better quarterback.

#156The numbers supported the idea.

#157In 2022 he threw for 5,250 yards and 41 touchdowns.

#158He won his second MVP.

#159Then the postseason tested something else.

#160Against Jacksonville, Mahomes suffered a high ankle sprain.

#161He wanted to keep playing.

#162Andy Reid wanted him evaluated.

#163Mahomes argued.

#164Reid finally told him that if he didn’t get an X-ray, he wasn’t going back into the game.

#165Mahomes stormed off toward the locker room.

#166The X-ray showed no fracture, and he returned.

#167There was only a week before the AFC Championship Game.

#168Chiefs trainer Julie Frymyer and the medical staff spent that week working on the ankle, trying to give Mahomes enough mobility and stability to play.

#169Late in the conference title game against Cincinnati, with the score tied, Mahomes couldn’t find an open receiver.

#170So he ran.

#171On the injured ankle.

#172The scramble gained the first down, and a late-hit penalty moved Kansas City into range for the winning field goal.

#173The Chiefs were going back to the Super Bowl.

#174There, against Philadelphia, Mahomes aggravated the same ankle.

#175Kansas City still won 38–35.

#176Mahomes was Super Bowl MVP again.

#177This version of him looked different from the young quarterback who had detonated the league in 2018.

#178The old magic was still there.

#179But now he didn’t need to use it on every play.

#180He had learned when to accept the boring answer.

#181That became even more important in 2023, when the Chiefs offense was less explosive and the defense carried more of the burden.

#182Kansas City still reached the Super Bowl.

#183Mahomes led an overtime win over San Francisco, 25–22.

#184His third championship.

#185By then, calling Kansas City a dynasty no longer felt premature.

#186The Chiefs went back to the Super Bowl again the next season with a chance to do something no team had ever done: win three in a row.

#187Philadelphia stopped them.

#188The Eagles won Super Bowl LIX 40–22.

#189Mahomes was sacked six times and threw two interceptions.

#190Philadelphia could generate pressure with its defensive front while leaving enough defenders behind to close passing lanes.

#191It looked uncomfortably similar to the kind of problem Tampa Bay had given him years earlier.

#192Mahomes had evolved.

#193That didn’t mean every problem had been solved forever.

#194Then came the 2025 season.

#195On December 14, Kansas City was playing the Los Angeles Chargers.

#196The Chiefs trailed 16–13 late in the game.

#197Mahomes scrambled to his right and got rid of the football.

#198A defender brought him down from behind.

#199His left knee twisted.

#200Mahomes stayed down.

#201The first major diagnosis was a torn ACL.

#202Further evaluation showed damage to the LCL as well.

#203Kansas City lost the game.

#204With the loss, the Chiefs’ streak of 10 consecutive playoff appearances ended.

#205Mahomes had spent years responding to bad moments by finding another play.

#206He had played through a dislocated kneecap.

#207He had dealt with a toe injury, a concussion, and the high ankle sprain.

#208In Jacksonville, he had been angry because Andy Reid wouldn’t immediately let him back on the field.

#209This time there was nothing to argue about.

#210There was no next drive.

#211There was no playoff game the following week.

#212The next day, Mahomes underwent surgery in Dallas to repair both the ACL and LCL.

#213For the first time in his NFL career, the solution wasn’t to keep moving.

#214Mahomes has always liked the next thing.

#215Next play.

#216Next drive.

#217Next opponent.

#218Next adjustment.

#219ACL rehabilitation doesn’t care.

#220A reconstructed ligament needs time.

#221Strength has to return.

#222Range of motion has to return.

#223Then running.

#224Then cutting.

#225Then football movement.

#226Then practice.

#227Trying harder cannot simply erase the calendar.

#228Mahomes changed his offseason around the rehab.

#229Instead of spending his usual time in Texas, he stayed in Kansas City and worked at the Chiefs facility.

#230From the beginning, he had a target.

#231Week 1 of the 2026 season.

#232Doctors initially warned him that being truly ready might take until October.

#233And Mahomes knew his own personality could become part of the problem.

#234In January, he explained that when someone gives him a target, he tends to reach it and then try to go a little farther.

#235This time, he said, the medical staff sometimes had to hold him back.

#236That was almost the opposite of the rest of his career.

#237Julie Frymyer had once helped get him from a high ankle sprain to an AFC Championship Game in a matter of days.

#238Now the staff’s job wasn’t only to help him progress.

#239It was also to tell him when not to progress.

#240The steps came slowly enough to sound ordinary.

#241In March, video showed Mahomes throwing a football again.

#242By May, he was participating in 7-on-7 work.

#243In July, he returned to Dr. Dan Cooper, the surgeon who had operated on the knee.

#244Mahomes cleared the required benchmarks.

#245He was allowed to participate fully in training camp.

#246No special restriction on his normal quarterback work.

#247He practiced with the first-team offense.

#248He did not play in the preseason, but that was part of the plan rather than evidence of a setback.

#249During the process, Mahomes also reached out to players who had already lived through major knee rehabilitation, including Tom Brady.

#250For years, Brady had represented the standard Mahomes was chasing.

#251Brady’s Patriots ended Mahomes’s first AFC Championship run.

#252Brady’s Buccaneers later beat him in the Super Bowl.

#253Now Mahomes was asking him about something entirely different.

#254What does it feel like to spend months coming back from a torn knee ligament?

#255As of September 4, 2026, Mahomes has not completed the comeback yet.

#256The Chiefs open the season on September 14 against the Denver Broncos.

#257He is on track to start.

#258But the game hasn’t happened.

#259No one can say the knee is perfect.

#260No one can say Kansas City’s dynasty is about to resume.

#261No one can say what Mahomes will look like on that first real snap.

#262And that uncertainty fits strangely well with the rest of his career.

#263His father taught him not to stay trapped by the last pitch.

#264Alex Smith taught him not to become so obsessed with perfect footwork that he stopped seeing the field.

#265Andy Reid helped him learn NFL structure without taking away the part of him that wanted to attempt impossible throws.

#266Then defenses forced him to become patient enough to take the easy ones.

#267Again and again, Mahomes became better by finding the next answer.

#268The biggest physical challenge of his career demanded something different.

#269No new arm angle could solve it.

#270No scramble could escape it.

#271There was no next play available yet.

#272So Patrick Mahomes had to learn one more skill.

#273How to wait until there was.

#274Alex Smith knew Patrick Mahomes might eventually take his job. So why did he choose to teach him how an NFL quarterback actually survives?