Patrick Mahomes may come to re-define the NFL in the way that Steph Curry has changed the shape of basketball.
Patrick Mahomes, quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, is not like other sportsmen. Over and over we hear that the greatest cricketers and rugby players and tennis players are those that seem to have time. But Mahomes is the sportsman that time forgot. He is a player for the new generation. He is a quarterback who thrives insanely when you take away his time.
Look at the All Blacks. The rush defence of the Lions, England and Ireland has caused them all manner of problems in the past couple of years. The All Blacks have been starved of time across the pitch. And without those precious, precious moments, even a rugby genius like Beauden Barrett can occasionally look ordinary.
Yet Mahomes just seems to get better when the dogs are closing in. The play-action pass or play fake is the scheme used by American football teams when they want to buy their quarterback time. It is designed to trick the defence into reacting to a running play, thereby creating more separation for the receivers, and more time for the quarterback.
Tom Brady becomes superman when you give him extra time in the pocket. Pull in the linebacker and safeties and Brady’s stats go off the charts. But what quarterback doesn’t like extra time. Drew Brees, Russell Wilson and Lamar Jackson, the next, new wonderkid, have intimidating completion rates when you give them time. That’s normal. Completely normal.
But Patrick Lavon Mahomes II is utterly abnormal. He is one of the poorer-rated quarterbacks in the league off the playaction pass. But under pressure his quarterback ratings are phenomenal. Mahomes wants to be in panic mode and it may help the All Blacks to understand why.
Put pressure on the passing quarterback and your chances of an interception are massively increased. With less time to execute, under threat of a sack, even the likes of Brady can make a poor decision or lose accuracy. However, Mahomes just seems to get better.
Perhaps Barrett has some of this. It’s not in his passing game or in his kicking game, which both can crumble when his time is reduced.
But put Barrett in fight or flight mode when he is on the run and he can be electric. From fullback Barrett does not always assess the field in front as well as Ben Smith, but when running off instinct, then Barrett can take a game away from any team in the world.
And this is the odd question facing the defence of the San Francisco 49ers ahead of the Super Bowl tomorrow in Miami. How much pressure do we want to put Mahomes under. If we sack him, then great, but if we just squeeze him out of the pocket, if we just cut down his time, then we could be making problems for ourselves.
The Chiefs are currently on an eight-game winning streak, during which time their offence is averaging over 30 points a game and has not scored less than 23 points. In four postseason games in 2019 and 2020 Mahomes has thrown for 1118 yards, 11 touchdowns and no interceptions.
Mahomes has a great group of receivers with Tyreek Hill’s unbelievable pace stretching the field and tight end Travis Kelce a master at finding the soft spot in the defence for the shorter outlet passes. But it is the genius of Mahomes which sets Kansas apart.
He’s a freaky athlete. His father was a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins and Patrick was rated good enough to make it to Major League Baseball. He was a heck of a high school basketball player and he could bomb a drive onto the roof of a golf cart 330 metres away. He is another athlete making the case for playing multiple sports as a kid.
You saw some of that all-round skill in the game-changing touchdown that Mahomes scored just before halftime in the AFC Championship game. Flushed out of the pocket, Mahomes set off left and was in the sights of a Tennessee
Titans linebacker.
He dropped his right hip just enough to hint at a pass and bought the room to get to the outside and down the line.
When the last of the cover came across he stepped inside and put on a spin move that could have come off a basketball court.
Mahomes may come to re-define the NFL in the way that Steph Curry has changed the shape of basketball. He is part of the vaunted Air Raid offence where the pass is over twothirds of the game and the quarterback makes a lot of calls at the line of scrimmage. You wonder if the All Blacks quarterback has the same autonomy at the line of scrimmage. Too often at the last World Cup there were too many pre-programmed plays. Richie Mo’unga needs to be given more freedom to read the game and call plays like he does at the Crusaders.
The Air Raid offence was put together by a group of college coaches and they said it was too nuts to work in the NFL. Mind you, they said much the same thing about Mahomes. One NFL analyst reckoned of the kid coming out of college: ‘‘He was certainly a gunslinger who left the pocket too soon and threw the ball all over the place. You saw raw talent, you didn’t see discipline. And he hadn’t won. You are automatically dealing with: ‘How do we know this guy can read NFL defences?’ The second problem was he played a little too much hero ball.’’
Fortunately for those long-suffering Chiefs’ fans, who hadn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1970 when a ticket cost $15, Mahomes found a pair of Kansas believers who didn’t think he played enough hero ball. General manager Brett Veach called Mahomes ‘‘the greatest player he’d ever seen’’ when he scouted him. Coach Andy Reid listened and the Chiefs were on the move.
At every level Mahomes has proved to be a record breaker. At every level he has made plays that seem almost supernatural. He has refined the no-look pass. He can almost sidearm a pass back across his body 50 yards down the field. He is a freak and a joy to watch who is about to surpass Brady for season merchandise.
And yet . . . in 1984 the 23-year-old Dan Marino broke all sorts of quarterback records. He threw for 5084 passing yards and 48 touchdowns. Even now that is extraordinary. And then Marino arrived at Super Bowl against, you’ve got it, the 49ers. He was intercepted twice as the Dolphins went down 38-16. Marino would never go to another Super Bowl. Teams would just run Miami into the ground.
Most good judges see history at least partly repeating. They think that the 49ers will grind the Chiefs down.
They think they will run over the top of them just as they ran over the Green Bay Packers in the NFC championship game.
I think they are probably right, but the heart won’t have it. For once we want to see spectacular offence triumph in a Super Bowl. We want to see a young quarterback win. Of the four quarterbacks younger than Mahomes to start their first Super Bowl, Ben Roethlisberger is the only one to have won.
We want to see Patrick Mahomes turn the Super Bowl turned into the Hero Bowl.
Patrick Mahomes may come to re-define the NFL in the way that Steph Curry has changed the shape of basketball.