We were standing around a podium at a suburban Miami hotel four years ago — maybe seven or eight of us left — listening to Patrick Mahomes explain how it is he plays quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs.
His dad was a big league pitcher. All the family friends were big league players. He grew up around clubhouses, taking ground balls, making throws from shortstop, hitting off the batting tees: It was all baseball all the time.
And then he started playing quarterback, differently than others played quarterback, using all the skills he had picked up playing shortstop and doing infield drills, throwing from angles others hadn’t seen before, seeing things that others didn’t seem to see.
Mahomes is only 28 years old and he is the greatest quarterback I’ve ever seen.
You can have Tom Brady and all his championships. You can have Joe Montana and his brilliant Super Bowl performances. You can have the statistics or the accuracy of Aaron Rodgers or Peyton Manning or Dan Marino. You can have the blood and guts of Brett Favre or Drew Brees. You can have be the athletic adonis that John Elway was or be the precision surgeon Johnny Unitas happened to be.
You can have all of that.
I’ll take Mahomes, the shortstop playing quarterback like no one has ever played before. He throws overhand when he needs to or has to. He throws sidearm, like he went deep in the hole and had to make the throw to second base. He throws underhand if need be, like he was starting an easy double play. And what he didn’t get from baseball — was football vision. Which is always and often what separates the absolute elite athletes of any sport.
Who had better vision that Wayne Gretzky or Steve Nash? Who had better vision and timing than Montana? Who has better vision now than Steph Curry, still, or LeBron James forever. This is why Nikita Kucherov leads the NHL in scoring and among the many reasons why Connor McDavid will challenge in the second half of the season for the scoring championship.
Mahomes sees what others cannot see. He doesn’t run the way Lamar Jackson or Justin Fields happen to run. Few can. But he has Ben Roethlisberger instincts at a higher level than Roethlisberger ever played. He slides like no one slides in the pocket. He finds openings that few are able to find.
He doesn’t need a Joe Burrow arm to bring the Chiefs back to the Super Bowl again — for the fourth time in five seasons — he just needs to be himself.
The quarterback he talked to us about being five years and two Super Bowl wins ago has grown up at a rather young age. Every year he does something he didn’t do the year before. Every year he finds another way to throw, another angle, another baseball play of some kind, to do differently. He doesn’t have the explosive offence with Tyreek Hill anymore. He has receivers who dropped too many passes this season. He had a beaten up Travis Kelce for a lot of the season, before he was equally brilliant — what a team they are — in the AFC title game on Sunday.
But it all starts with Mahomes and coach Andy Reid, the perfect combination of quarterback and head coach, if any combination in any sport is ever perfect. Reid has absolute understanding of what Mahomes can do — and when he can do it — and Mahomes responds with his remarkable talent and charm.
He doesn’t throw interceptions in big games and big moments. He takes fewer sacks than almost anyone who plays the game, and that’s lining up behind a wonky offensive line. The pass he threw Sunday to Marquez Valdes-Scantling — a basketball version of an alley oop deep downfield — was a pass that almost fell from the sky, softly into the receiver’s hands. Who else can do that?
I’ve had a fortunate view of Super Bowls up close over the years. The first Super Bowl I covered, sitting next to the late Jim Hunt, had Montana playing against Elway.
After that I got to chronicle wins by Brady, wins by Troy Aikman, a win by Rodgers and Manning and somehow wins by the other brother, Eli Manning. I had the opportunity to write about the joy of victories by Steve Young and Kurt Warner and two wins and two losses by Elway, and even the strange triumph of Joe Flacco over Colin Kaepernick.
I once thought Montana was the best big game quarterback I’d ever seen. And he was exceptional. And I once thought, like so many think now, that Brady is the greatest ever because of his array of championships. And I thought nobody could do what Rodgers could do, or throw the way Marino threw.
Opinions and thoughts change over time just as games and sports do. The Chiefs went into Buffalo one Sunday ago and into Baltimore, against the toughest defence in football, and Mahomes didn’t need a cape to be Superman. He was just himself. That was Superman enough to get him to his fourth Super Bowl in five seasons.
Patrick Mahomes. The greatest to ever play.
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