Patrick Mahomes Took the Next Step in His Development—by Getting More Boring

Patrick Mahomes has been an elite NFL quarterback since the moment he stepped onto the field. Forget about his MVP campaign in 2018, his first season as the Kansas City Chiefs’ full-time starter; Mahomes even looked the part in his very first start, which came in a meaningless game at the end of his rookie season.

That day against the Denver Broncos, Mahomes did all the flashy things we know him for now. He didn’t throw a touchdown, but he had 284 passing yards and averaged 8.1 per attempt while leading the Chiefs to a 27-24 win on the road against the NFL’s 11th-ranked defense by DVOA. The film is littered with your standard magic Mahomes fare. He even threw in a no-look pass, which you can get away with as a former MVP, but is freaking bold to attempt as a rookie. I mean, look at this nonsense:

Given everything the 27-year-old has accomplished since that professional debut, it’s easy to forget how shocking the performance was to football fans. But Matt Nagy, who was Andy Reid’s offensive coordinator back then and now serves as the Chiefs quarterbacks coach, says it was hardly surprising to those in the building. The Chiefs coaches had seen it in practice. They had seen it all over his Texas Tech film. And when it came time to devise a game plan for Mahomes’s first start, they didn’t hold back.

“Even back in college, there wasn’t a play he couldn’t make,” Nagy told me this week. “I can remember driving to my son’s baseball game and showing him highlights of [Mahomes] on YouTube on my phone. And when you find a player that is that talented, you want to do everything you can find.”

Instead of protecting the rookie quarterback with a conservative approach, Kansas City’s staff essentially said, “Screw it, this guy rules, so let’s show him off.” That was the starting point for Mahomes. The following season, he went on to win the league’s highest individual honor. The next year, he won a Super Bowl. And he was back playing for a second ring the season after that. By that point, Mahomes was already viewed as the NFL’s best quarterback. He was 25 years old.

That second Super Bowl appearance didn’t go so well. Most of the Chiefs’ starting offensive line was out, and the Buccaneers pressured Mahomes on more than half of his dropbacks. Kansas City lost 31-9, and it was really the first time Mahomes had played a bad game—at least statistically. To those of us watching at home, he still seemed valiant, even in defeat. His incompletions were more memorable than any of Tom Brady’s passes. He even had the Bucs sideline in disbelief.

Mahomes wasn’t so impressed by his performance, though. Months after the game, he told The Ringer’s Kevin Clark that he had watched the film twice, looking for ways to get better, and he’d zeroed in on one particular feature of his game that had to be rectified. “I kind of get back to that backyard-style football a little bit too much,” Mahomes said in 2021. “And you could definitely see that in the Super Bowl. I mean, there were times that pockets were clean and I was still scrambling. … I’ve been going back [working] on that. Making sure that I trust the guys around me and trust the pocket, make the read within the pocket and not try to make the big play happen.”

The NFL’s most exciting (and most effective) quarterback decided that the way to get better was to play a more boring brand of football—one with fewer big plays. As counterintuitive as that may sound, Mahomes has proved himself right in the two years since. He’s coming off the best regular season of his career and will likely take home the NFL MVP award for the second time on Saturday night, right before he plays for a second Super Bowl ring on Sunday. And he’s gotten to this point while setting career lows in both deep completions and average depth of target.

Those kinds of numerical dips don’t lead to better results for the other quarterbacks who walk this earth, but they did for Mahomes. He has become the more boring quarterback he set out to be nearly two years ago—and yet he’s simultaneously widened the gap between himself and the NFL’s other 31 starters.

If 2022 is the best season of Mahomes’s career to date, then 2021 was surely the worst. It wasn’t bad by most standards, but the Chiefs star set career lows in expected points added, passer rating, and yards per attempt while throwing a career-high 13 interceptions and taking a career-high 28 sacks. Pro Football Focus graded him as the 13th-best quarterback in the league, and it wasn’t a totally undeserved rating.

That was an awkward transition year for Mahomes, who was caught between the high-flying quarterback he’d been at the start of his career and the one he’d eventually become in 2022. Now, that guy was still an elite passer most of the time, but he was prone to long stretches of uneven play. Opposing defenses, having been burned by Mahomes and Tyreek Hill over the previous three seasons, sold out to take away the deeper parts of the field. And while Mahomes had started to look for safer options underneath more frequently, he was still largely reluctant to do so. He’d often force the issue by trying to hit a throwing window that just wasn’t there—hence the inflated interception total—or he would work through his progression and eventually get to his checkdown, but it took far too long. Hence the highest sack rate since his rookie season.

During one particularly bad stretch for the offense, a frustrated Mahomes said that the Chiefs were seeing coverages that no other offense was seeing. He wasn’t wrong: Defenses were dropping deep and daring him to throw the checkdown, and it wasn’t until November that he started to oblige them, sparking a late-season resurgence.

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After Kansas City’s memorable divisional-round shoot-out with the Bills, it appeared that Mahomes had fully turned a corner. Then came the AFC title game against the Bengals, which may have been the first time Mahomes’s individual performance was the biggest factor in a season-ending loss. He started the game off hot, averaging 10-plus yards per dropback over the first two quarters, but Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo threw some changeups at him in the second half. Cincinnati started dropping eight defenders into coverage while rushing with only three. This was a more extreme version of the coverages Mahomes had referenced earlier in the season, and it seemed to break his brain. Mahomes turned the ball over multiple times in the second half, gifting the Bengals with short fields, and Cincinnati took advantage of those en route to a 27-24 come-from-behind win. It was the worst half of football Mahomes had ever played in the NFL. And it appeared to be a major setback in his maturation process.

As it turns out, though, it was merely a speed bump. Mahomes hasn’t played a bad game this season. And he’s winning in ways we’ve never really seen him try before. What was once a passing game based almost entirely on targets for Hill and Travis Kelce has become more egalitarian. No Chiefs pass catcher saw more than 25 percent of the team’s targets this season, with new additions JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling replacing Hill’s production. Second-round rookie Skyy Moore and midseason acquisition Kadarius Toney also played small but important roles in the passing game, as did Justin Watson, a Day 3 pick out of the Ivy League who racked up 315 yards from scrimmage.

Part of this approach can be explained by Hill’s departure in the offseason and the front office’s decision to replace him by committee rather than finding another star receiver. But most of it, according to offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, comes from Mahomes’s individual improvement. “He’s seeing the field better,” Bieniemy told me this week. “On top of that, just think about how diverse he’s been distributing the football [compared to past seasons]. And then on top of that, he’s stepping up and finding the checkdown.

“Everybody has become a piece of the puzzle.”

Mahomes isn’t just divvying up targets more this season. He’s throwing the ball to different areas of the field as well. Here are heat maps of all his completions that produced at least 1.0 EPA from 2021 and 2022, via TruMedia:

Mahomes is not only forcing defenses to account for multiple receiving options on every play; he’s also making them defend the entire width of the field. If defenses want to play zone, Mahomes is forcing those defenders to cover a lot of grass. If they play man, Mahomes can just pick out the right matchup, knowing that he has reliable targets who aren’t going to draw extra help, like Kelce and (in the past) Hill.

“It just makes it tougher for teams to try and game plan us,” Bieniemy said of this more well-rounded passing game.

Mahomes has lapped the rest of the field, other than Josh Allen, in EPA this season, despite not hitting downfield throws as often. And the offense is still averaging 29.2 points per game, the best figure in the league. But out of all the stats that show Mahomes’s maturation this season, this one sums it up best: A year ago, Mahomes averaged 2.41 seconds per throw on running back targets of less than 5 air yards—so checkdowns, essentially—which ranked 20th in the league, per TruMedia. Even rookie Zach Wilson was getting those throws off quicker in 2021. On those passes this year, his average time to throw dropped to 2.16 seconds. That was the third fastest in the NFL, even faster than Brady.

This week, when I asked Mahomes for a progress report on the goals he set for himself following the Super Bowl loss, those checkdown throws were the first thing he brought up. “I’ve gotten extremely better,” Mahomes said. “I took that as a challenge: How can you get the ball out of your hand when stuff’s not going great?

“You saw that this season. When I got into situations where I wasn’t having as much success, and we weren’t getting drives going, it was about getting those easy completions, getting easy stuff. Because then you can have success with all the other stuff.”

Even more than Mahomes himself, Nagy might have the most interesting perspective on the quarterback’s development. Nagy left for the Bears head-coaching job before Mahomes was named the Chiefs’ full-time starter, and by the time he got back, his former pupil had won an MVP award and a Super Bowl and had become the NFL’s top passer. Nagy says the quarterback he coached back in 2017 was a far different guy from the one he’s coaching now—at least mentally. “It’s unbelievable,” Nagy said this week. “He’s very, very routine. Monday he comes in—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—it is the same to the minute. Every day, the entire week.

“It wasn’t like that in ’17. He kind of learned that as he grew. … [Former Chiefs QB coach] Mike Kafka did a great job with him. Eric Bieniemy, coach Reid, everybody. But Patrick put his own spin on it. And now he’s just methodical, and it’s pretty cool to see.”

It’s probably not so cool for the opposing coaching staffs tasked with stopping Mahomes, who has already rapidly evolved from a super-raw college prospect out of an air raid offense to the more complete quarterback we’ve seen this season. That’s an entire career arc that the QB has packed into the first five years of his career. This dude isn’t even in his prime yet, which is the truly scary part. It’s hard to even fathom what he could become over the next five years.

I asked Bieniemy whether there was a specific moment when he realized that Mahomes had taken this latest step in his development. He chuckled and said, “I mean, hell, every year. It started [in 2018], and it just continues. … And I guarantee you, next year he’s gonna be even better.”

Before we get to next season, though, Mahomes has one more game to play in this one. Two years after that debacle in Tampa, which sparked his development and eventually pushed him into the next phase of his career, he’s back in the Super Bowl and going up against another nasty pass rush—this time, the Eagles’—that’s playing in front of a highly disciplined secondary. It’s the toughest challenge Mahomes has faced all season—but he’s spent the last two calendar years preparing for it.