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percent of the time. Ten years later, all but three teams are operating out of shotgun more than 50 percent of the time with the Baltimore Ravens and the Chiefs, the other Super Bowl participant, leading the way.

The college game has come to the NFL. The spread has taken hold as a foundational offensive principle. Kansas City coach Andy Reid is still dominating, and his Chiefs are the prime example of how NFL offenses — and, in turn, the entire league — have evolved since the last time a Super Bowl was contested in Miami Gardens.

“He’s always making me think,” Henne said. “He’s always a step ahead, always trying to put new stuff in it to make it fun and not boring.”

Decades — like all time — are an artificial construct, but the 2010s signaled a clear shift in the way NFL offenses operate. The league’s shift to pass-happy offenses began in the mid-2000s when the NFL cracked down on enforcing illegal contact. Eight of the 10 quarterbacks in all-time passing yards played in the 2000s, and 11 of the top 13 in pass attempts. Rule changes made it far more advantageous to pass this century, and teams started to adjust in the 2000s, albeit primarily by just throwing more or running more play-action in their pro-style and West Coast offenses.

Super Bowl 44 in 2010 — at the end of the 2009 season — pitted two of the NFL’s all-time best passers. Peyton Manning led the Indianapolis Colts, who led the NFL by throwing on 64.6 percent of plays, and Drew Brees led the New Orleans Saints, who were 10th, throwing 56.4 percent of the time.

The Colts provided a sign of what was to come. Indianapolis ran 598 plays out of shotgun in 2009, the second-most in the league and 44.8 percent of its total offensive snaps. In 2006, not a single team hit the 44-percent threshold, and the league ran just 19 percent of its total snaps out of the gun.

Right behind the Colts were the Philadelphia Eagles, coached by Reid and running his West Coast offense. The Eagles ran 571 of their 1,237 snaps out of shotgun to lead the league at 46.2 percent. Reid was always an innovator, going pass happy before it was cool and started to work spread concepts into his system when Philadelphia signed Michael Vick ahead of the 2009 season. In 2013, Reid told the Wall Street Journal he felt college offenses were “five years ahead” of the NFL’s, so he brought in Brad Childress, his former offensive coordinator with the Eagles, to be his special teams coordinator and, more importantly, his spread game analyst.

Alex Smith, now with the Washington Redskins, was Reid’s first cipher in Missouri. The quarterback played for Urban Meyer with the Utah Utes, running the former coach’s runheavy spread offense. Meyer was a pioneer of the run-pass option, which turned Tim Tebow into one of the best college quarterbacks of all time, and Smith helped Reid bring some of these spread concepts to the NFL.

Patrick Mahomes, however, was the muse he had waited for all along. The Chiefs took the quarterback with the No. 10 pick in the 2017 NFL Draft and turned to him as their full-time starter last season. He immediately won the NFL Most Valuable Player and now has Kansas City in the Super Bowl in just his second season as a full-time starter. He’s on his way to potentially an historic career, and he has shifted the paradigm of what an NFL quarterback can be.

Henne is the first to admit his initial skepticism. Mahomes played for Texas Tech, who are known for putting up cartoonish passing numbers without really significant win-loss results. After spending two years as Mahomes’ backup, Henne “absolutely” feels quarterbacks who come from quarterback-friendly systems can succeed in the NFL.

“He’ll tell you, his offense — he ran some of the similar stuff that we do now, but it wasn’t difficult and they didn’t really have to read defenses,” Henne said. “He’s learned.”

Reid has learned from him, too.

“We take a lot of stuff that Pat was doing in college and we put it in the NFL,” said Chiefs running back LeSean McCoy, who also played for Reid in

Philadelphia. “This is the West Coast system, some of the stuff that Pat did in college mixed together.”

There’s no way to track “spread” plays run across the NFL, so the number of shotgun snaps — a hallmark of spread offense — is one of the best signs. Kansas City ran the second-most shotgun plays in the NFL this season, taking 68.3 percent of their snaps out of the gun. They had a topfive offense despite Mahomes missing nearly three full games with an ankle injury, and the Ravens, the only team to run more shotgun than them, had the best.

They run different spreads — the Chiefs’ is Big 12-style air raid offenseinfluenced, while the Ravens’ is run-heavy read option-influenced — but both are cribbing from the college game.

“There’s times when I go into his office and he’ll be watching old game tape,” McCoy said. “The TV’s like grayish. The guys have the leather helmets. He’s watching it and it’s like amazing. He’s learning from it.”

There are always outliers, though, and this year one of those outliers is Kansas

City’s Super Bowl opponent. The 49ers operate from under center as much as almost anyone and they won the NFC Championship Game by throwing just eight passes.

One day — maybe in the 2020s — NFL defenses will figure out how to stop these spread offenses. Defenses are trying to catch up by playing more defensive backs and prioritizing speed at linebacker.

Whenever it reaches a tipping point, the NFL will find a new offensive trend to fall in love with. More likely, it will find a variation of an old one to fall in love with again — maybe something like what coach Kyle Shanahan is doing with San Francisco.

“He does one heck of a job,” Reid said Tuesday at the JW Marriott Miami Turnberry Resort & Spa. “He does a lot of two-back stuff that was popular back in the day and will be coming back because of his success. Football’s a big circle. What’s good today won’t be good tomorrow and will be cool again down the road.”

David Wilson: 305-376-3406, @DBWilson2