Mahomes’ backups share the secrets to superstar’s success
Since he has become the Kansas City Chiefs’ full-time starter, Patrick Mahomes has been backed up by former Miami Dolphins. Quarterbacks Matt Moore and Chad Henne say his accomplishments come from more than arm strength.
There was no legend of Patrick Mahomes when Chad Henne joined the Kansas
City Chiefs in 2018 following an extended stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Tall tales, maybe — mostly from his days of putting up video-game numbers for the Texas Tech Red Raiders — but Mahomes was just a talented quarterback with no assurance of being successful when the Chiefs brought in Henne to be Mahomes’ veteran backup ahead of last season.
Henne learned quickly there was more to Mahomes
than just the cannon arm and slippery pocket presence. In every quarterbacks meeting for the last two years, Mahomes and Henne have sat beside one another, scribbling notes into their iPads. Henne quickly realized Mahomes’ notes were immaculate. Henne would look up at the whiteboard at the front of the room and then glance over to Mahomes’ iPad. Nothing was out of place.
“He’s so detail-oriented. The way he takes notes will blow your mind,” Henne said.
“He’s OCD, he’s superstitious — he comes from a baseball background, so he’s very superstitious — but his note-taking is like phenomenal. He writes everything down. He knows what he does every day. It’s a routine. He doesn’t stray [from] it.”
Henne, who was a second-round pick by the Miami Dolphins in the 2008 NFL Draft, was there last season as Mahomes made his meteoric rise from rookie backup to Most Valuable Player. He saw the glimpses of stardom before any of the public did, and he saw all the intricacies of what made him more than just an elite talent.
When Henne went down with a knee injury just days before this season began, the Chiefs signed quarterback Matt Moore, who spent one season as a teammate of Henne’s with the Miami Dolphins. They have spent all season watching Mahomes elevate his game. Although an injury kept him from replicating his MVP numbers from a year earlier, Mahomes has the Chiefs in the Super
Bowl for the first time since Jan. 1970.
No quarterback in the NFL is like Mahomes and if Kansas City beats the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV on Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, it will almost certainly be because Mahomes makes a play or two that no other quarterback can.
“He’s an impressive kid, man. He does a lot of things that’s just like, ‘Wow’,” said Moore, who started three games while Mahomes was hurt this season. “He plays within the scheme, but he’s always wowing people.”
Like Henne, Moore could see Mahomes was different before he even saw the superstar play in person. Mahomes already had an NFL MVP Award under his belt by the time Moore joined the Chiefs, but he could only learn so much about him from afar. Once he got up close, he learned about the mental side of Mahomes’
game.
In one of Moore’s first team meetings, coach Andy Reid was diagramming plays. He pointed out the intended alignment of the wide receivers.
“He was talking about a triangle where guys are going to be on the field. Coach Reid said, ‘Oh, this is a perfect triangle right here,’ and at the same time, him and Pat both said, ‘Isosceles,’ which, why would they say that?” Moore said. “I looked at Pat like, ‘Is that normal?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, we do that a lot.’ ”
Moore spent 2018 out of the NFL, so he never got to see an in-person look at Mahomes while he was taking over the league.
Even the stuff that he has made a common part of his game blew away Moore in his early days with the team.
“We were just like warming up and he was doing his no-look stuff, and all that in warm-ups at practice and I was just like, ‘What’s he doing?’ ” Moore said. “But he makes it happen on Sunday, man. It’s really impressive.”
Henne admits he didn’t know anything about Mahomes when he was coming into the league. Henne first learned about the quarterback when Henne was with the Jacksonville Jaguars and Mahomes came in for a visit ahead of the 2017 NFL Draft.
Henne, who played in a pro-style system for the
Michigan Wolverines, had his doubts about Mahomes because of the air-raid offense that he played in with the Red Raiders.
Consider Henne a convert. He said Mahomes has flipped the way
Henne feels about the spread, pass-happy systems of the Big 12 Conference and much of college football — as long as the player puts in the work like Mahomes has.
“He ran some similar stuff that we do now, but it wasn’t difficult and they didn’t really have to read defenses,” Henne said.
“He’s like, ‘If it wasn’t there, I’d just scramble around.’ Well, you do that now, too. He’s learned and he sticks to the process, but he knows if the play’s not there, he’s mobile enough to get around.”
Chad Henne about Patrick Mahomes
David Wilson: 305-376-3406, @DBWilson2