How Patrick Mahomes factors into the NFL Draft in Kansas City — especially the QBs
In the fall and winter of 2017, the Chiefs’ starting quarterback would come into work on the team’s scheduled days off. He’d bring a couple of his understudies with him too, one of them in the spotlight before he’d ever thrown an NFL pass.
Those days didn’t have the regimen or structure of a practice, but they made sure the itinerary didn’t skip the film work. Made sure to study how defenses were reacting to head coach Andy Reid’s Kansas City offense.
This wasn’t the exercise of a team desperate to figure out all that had gone wrong, by the way. Quite the opposite, actually. The Chiefs had a top-five offense that year for the first time in more than a decade, the end of one streak and the beginning of another altogether.
And yet their trio of quarterbacks spent their days off at work.
This is the backdrop upon which Patrick Mahomes entered the NFL.
Alex Smith was that Chiefs starter. Mahomes, his understudy.
The relevance of that story could be found at KC’s Central High School on Wednesday morning. The NFL Draft is in Kansas City this week, in case you haven’t heard, and that has brought 17 prospects projected to go in the first round.
The group attending the draft in person, hoping to hear their names called Thursday night, includes four quarterbacks: Bryce Young (Alabama), C.J. Stroud (Ohio State), Will Levis (Kentucky) and Anthony Richardson (Florida).
Without a consensus order for the four, the pre-draft conversations revolve around their skill-sets. Their arm strength. Their accuracy. Their S2 Cognition Test score, if you’re Stroud. Their. Their. Their.
But what is too often absence from the most important question of the work — will these guys be any good as pros? — is the element out of their control.
The environment. The situation.
None of these four draft prospects is Patrick Mahomes. Think we can safely say that, right? But none of these four draft prospects will have it as good as Patrick Mahomes had it, either.
I don’t mean to frame this as a debate of nature or nurture.
How about nature and nurture?
Shouldn’t they both matter? An equal part of the pre-draft conversation?
We asked all four of the prospects how they’d classify an ideal situation for their rookie seasons.
“Any team that’s gonna help me develop,” Richardson said. “People always talk about development. That’s what I need. I feel like everybody needs that. Everybody can grow in different aspects of the game.”
“I want to be in a place where people compete,” Young said. “I want to be around a coaching staff and a team that wants to compete (and) wants to win.”
“I definitely want to be in a high-powered offense,” Stroud said, before adding some details of what that might look like.
“I don’t have a say in the matter,” Levis said, “so I feel like I’m just going to approach the situation put in front of me the best way.”
Four completely different answers.
All of them right.
A good offense? Sure. A place where you can develop? Absolutely. A winning team? Of course. (Do we really think all 32 teams offer this? Please.)
Oh, yeah, and Levis’ reply: virtually no say in the matter. Virtually no say in an element of their future that will play a critical role in their success, perhaps just as critical as their 40-yard dash times.
Why don’t we treat it as such?
There’s no one single way to measure quarterback success, but I looked at the PFF quarterback rankings, compiled immediately following the 2022 season, for the ensuing examination.
Mahomes topped the list, and we’ve already mentioned the situation in which he entered the league. A pretty good one.
Joe Burrow is second, and he is the outlier here — asked to completely overhaul a Cincinnati franchise and successful in doing so. Third is Josh Allen, who joined a Buffalo team that had finished 9-7 the year before he arrived. Tua Tagovailoa is fourth, and the Dolphins were 10-6 when they selected him. Jalen Hurts, fifth, joined the Eagles after they’d made the postseason in three of the previous four years, one of them concluding with a Super Bowl. The Chargers, two years after finishing 12-4, drafted Justin Herbert.
The next appearance on the list is particularly interesting: Geno Smith. When he arrived in New York, the Jets had finished 30th and 25th in offense the previous two seasons. He thrived in Seattle last year. Wonder what the difference might’ve been?
Let’s look at the inverse examples, too. At the bottom of those PFF quarterback rankings sits Zach Wilson, who took over a Jets team that had gone 23-57 in the previous five seasons. Next to last, Baker Mayfield arrived Cleveland after the Browns had gone 1-31 over the previous two years.
I’ll grant you that this data could be used to construct another argument, which is that good teams draft good players and bad teams tend to draft bad players. That’s a subjective argument, though there’s almost certainly some truth to it.
But there is an objective thread here. The quarterbacks atop the list, save Burrow, were not asked to overhaul a franchise in disarray. Instead, they were often the last piece of a puzzle inside an organization that had already figured some things out. The organizations that probably thought, If only we had a quarterback..
A culture of winning. Coaching. Offense. However you define it.
Mahomes has too many tools to have failed at this level. He is the single most important piece in the entire Chiefs operation, and that’s an operation that includes Reid. But it already did include Reid before Mahomes arrived. It already included a playoff team. It already included a 12-win division champion. Heck, the former quarterback had the offense ranked fifth in total yardage.
The Chiefs didn’t ask Mahomes to alter their course, but to prolong their course. To extend the paving a bit.
The player matters above all else. The label — boom or bust — will forever follow him.
But it sure helps if the situation is booming.
Ask the quarterback who held the Lombardi Trophy last.
This story was originally published April 27, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "How Patrick Mahomes factors into the NFL Draft in Kansas City — especially the QBs."