Kliff Kingsbury has long been known as the guy who saw in Patrick Mahomes before pretty much anyone else outside of East Texas did.
But …
Even he’ll stop short of saying he saw coming.
“I just knew that I’d never seen anything like it, the arm talent, the awareness, the pocket presence, the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head-type stuff,” Kingsbury said over the phone, coming out of a coaches meeting at USC on Tuesday. “I remember talking to Andy [Reid before the draft] and he said, ‘What do you think?’ I just said, ‘He’s the best I’ve seen. I’ve never seen anything like it. If you were going to take a chance on one guy your entire career, this would be the guy that you’d take a chance on.’
“Luckily, he’s proved me right. And then some.”
Here is the : Mahomes is headed into his seventh NFL season, not just having proved his college coach’s hyperbolic statements of spring 2017 right—he’s exceeded them by becoming, really, the unquestioned best player in football. So much so that last year the guy many would rank second, the one who’s probably been the biggest thorn in Mahomes’s side (that’s Joe Burrow), conceded, “I don’t think there is any argument now. It’s Pat.”
Our annual quarterback poll has, once again, borne that out.
As Burrow said, it’s Pat and everyone else.
Mahomes didn’t just win the poll for a fourth straight year; he appeared on every single ballot, he gobbled up 71 of 80 first-place votes and he was first or second for every single voter. And rightfully so—he’s won the AFC West and made it to the AFC championship game in all five of his years as a starter, played in three Super Bowls and won two. With his 28th birthday still 10 days away, he stands alone with Tom Brady and Joe Montana as one of three players in NFL history to have multiple Super Bowl regular-season MVP trophies.
So even if you’re measuring this against what Kingsbury, who had Mahomes for three years at Texas Tech, said to Reid, Mahomes’s résumé looks like one of his off-balance throws—so spectacular you’d almost think it’s fake. But it’s most assuredly not, and the scary thing is we may still be on the front end of what Mahomes will end up accomplishing in the NFL.
