Patrick Mahomes ranks No. 101 on Joe Posnanski's Pro Football 101 list

By Joe Posnanski
Special to FOX Sports

Editor's Note: Throughout the 2021 NFL season, Joe Posnanski will rank the 101 best players in pro football history, in collaboration with FOX Sports. Posnanski will publish a detailed look at all 101 players on Substack. The countdown starts with player No. 101, Patrick Mahomes.

For as long as there has been an NFL, coaches have sought to answer pro football’s eternal question: How do you develop a talented young quarterback? 

Do you throw the quarterback into the deep end of the pool right away, the way the Bengals did last year with Joe Burrow? Do you let the quarterback sit on the bench for some years and learn the game, the way the Packers did with Aaron Rodgers? Do you let the quarterback take his lumps for a long time in hopes that he’ll pull through in the end, the way the Steelers did with Terry Bradshaw?

Joe Montana and Roger Staubach started one game their rookie seasons. But so did JaMarcus Russell and Todd Marinovich.

Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson started all 16. But so did Rick Mirer and Geno Smith.

Tom Brady was third-string as a rookie. Kurt Warner spent what he had hoped would be his rookie season stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee and then playing Arena football. John Unitas spent what would have been his rookie season playing semi-pro football around Pittsburgh and working in construction.

In other words, nobody has figured it out yet.

In 2017, after years and years of living with borrowed quarterbacks, the Kansas City Chiefs traded up to the No. 10 overall spot in the draft. They made the move to take a charismatic young man who had grown up around Major League Baseball clubhouses, a college passing machine named Patrick Mahomes.

Not everyone was convinced Mahomes had an especially bright NFL future. While he had made countless extraordinary plays in the Air Raid offense at Texas Tech, he’d also lost more games than he’d won, and he made enough mistakes to worry many scouts.

"A best-case scenario for Mahomes is tantalizing," Pro Football Focus wrote. "The problem is the same feel for making plays also leads to a number of poor decisions with the football."

"For some observers, Mahomes’ power arm has him at the top of the quarterback list," ESPN admitted while ranking Mahomes as a late second-round choice. "But his accuracy wavers when he can’t match his delivery to the throw required."

"During the fall," Charlie Campbell wrote for WalterFootball.com, "one playoff team told me they have a second-round grade on Mahomes and compare him to Derek Carr coming out of Fresno State. Two other teams said they had Mahomes in the third round, while one playoff general manager said he had him in the fourth round. There is a love/hate with Mahomes."

The one part everyone agreed on — Mahomes’ fans and critics alike — is that the team drafting him would have to do a brilliant job developing him from a thrilling but mistake-prone quarterback leading a gimmick college offense into an actual NFL quarterback.

Then he was drafted by the one team in the NFL that had not developed a young quarterback since, well, ever.

Let’s talk a little bit about the Chiefs’ quarterback history.

* * *

For the first 10 years of the team’s existence in Kansas City, the Chiefs' quarterback was a guy named Len Dawson. He was a college star at Purdue — they called him "the Golden Boy" before anyone ever called Paul Hornung that at Notre Dame. 

Dawson was the first-round pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1957 — taken ahead of, among others, a Syracuse running back named Jim Brown — and the team immediately brought in a 243-year-old Bobby Layne to make sure Dawson never played.

It's hard to believe this now, kids, but the Steelers used to be a laughingstock.

The Cleveland Browns traded for Dawson … and they didn’t play him, either. Finally, when he was 27, Dawson was released, and he tried out for the Dallas Texans of the newly formed AFL. The team owner, Lamar Hunt, watched Dawson play in practice and said, loud enough for Dawson to hear, "That guy will never make the team."

I tell you all this not only because Dawson became pro football’s most accurate passer, is in the Hall of Fame and led the Chiefs to two of the first four Super Bowls but also because he was the first example of what would become a Chiefs philosophy: Why develop your own quarterback when you can just get somebody else’s? 

— Bill Kenney had been a 12th-round pick of the Miami Dolphins, and he was the Chiefs’ leading passer every year from 1981 to ’87.

— He was replaced by Steve DeBerg, a 10-year veteran who had played for San Francisco, Denver and Tampa Bay.

— DeBerg was replaced by Dave Krieg, who was 33 years old and had played so long in Seattle that he had been sacked 341 times.

— Krieg was replaced by the legend Joe Montana, who had been traded by San Francisco after leading the team to four Super Bowls.

— Montana retired, and he was replaced by Steve Bono, who had been a backup in Minnesota, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and he almost immediately made a comment about San Francisco restaurants being better than Kansas City’s, which made him exactly as popular as you might expect.

— Bono was replaced by Elvis Grbac, who had also been a backup in San Francisco. He never said anything about the restaurants, which was wise. However, after a particularly difficult game, he did comment that he could not throw the ball and catch it, which also did not go over all that well.

— Grbac battled for the starting role with Rich Gannon, who had come to Kansas City at age 30 after years in Minnesota and Washington (and a missed season because of an injured shoulder).

Well, we can just keep on going: Grbac/Gannon led to Rams backup Trent Green, who led to Patriots backup Matt Cassel, who led to another 49ers quarterback, Alex Smith. 

Yes, there were a few meager efforts to try out a young quarterback here and there — the late 1970s and early 1980s Chiefs did draft Steve Fuller and Todd Blackledge, though neither quite worked out — but I think you get the idea. This team believed from the very beginning that the way to win is to build the rest of the team and then get some veteran quarterback to run the show. The Chiefs never wanted the headache of trying to create their own.

And then … they traded up in the draft to get Patrick Mahomes.

The year Mahomes arrived in Kansas City, the Chiefs went 10-6 … and lost right away in the playoffs. It was a familiar story. In the 23 seasons after Montana was knocked out of the 1993 AFC Championship Game, the Chiefs reached the playoffs 10 times. They won one playoff game in those years.

Anyway, Mahomes barely played in his rookie season. Instead, he spent games on the bench behind Smith, and he spent practices playing scout-team quarterback. 

It was during those practices that people around the Chiefs began to realize Mahomes was different. It wasn’t just his arm; coaches and players are used to seeing rookie quarterbacks throw the heck out of the football. It wasn’t just his speed, though he flashed more than expected. And it wasn’t even the absurd no-look passes he would occasionally make.

No, the thing they noticed was the way Mahomes would transform into the next opponent’s quarterback like he was Daniel Day-Lewis. When the Chiefs prepared to play the Steelers, Mahomes became Ben Roethlisberger in the way he would just stay in the pocket, fearlessly wait and wait and wait and wait until that big-play opportunity opened up. When the Chiefs prepared for the Dallas Cowboys, he became Dak Prescott, looking to fling the ball all over the field.

"It really helped develop my game," Mahomes told Sports Illustrated. "When we were playing the Jets, with Josh McCown, I’d have to throw a lot of deep balls. Tyrod Taylor with the Bills, I’d have to scramble around a lot. With Tom Brady, it was about dissecting the defense. I had to do stuff I wasn’t comfortable with and see what I liked and didn’t like."

He embraced all of it. That was the thing that blew everybody’s mind. He acted like it was all one big adventure — like going on a plane ride for the first time or something — without showing any of the nerves or frustration or impatience that are the hallmark of youth.

Well, Mahomes had been around this sort of thing all his life. His dad, Pat Sr., was a big-league pitcher for 11 years, and so Patrick had grown up in the bubble of pressure and competition and intensity that is professional sports. He watched closely when Alex Rodriguez, already baseball’s highest-paid player, showed up hours before a game just to hit a ball off the tee. He watched closely when Derek Jeter, already baseball’s most admired player, showed up early just to take extra ground balls. 

He watched closely as his godfather, LaTroy Hawkins, prepared himself every single day, how he was always present — you know, no days off, no plays off, and that’s why he pitched in the big leagues until he was 42 years old. 

As such, Mahomes didn’t fall into the same traps as many rookies. When he finally got to play, in a meaningless New Year’s Eve game in Denver after the Chiefs had secured their slot in the 2017 playoffs, he threw his first interception, and he felt … great about it. So weird. So different. 

"I had been feeling jumpy and jittery and really excited when the game started," he said. "And after that interception, it almost, like, settled me down and helped me get back into the mindset of not trying to do too much."

He says that, but "doing too much" would become the Mahomes trademark. Late in that very game, with the score tied 24-24, he was reinserted to run a two-minute drill. With 1:44 left, he took the snap, nobody was open, and he was being chased by two of the greatest pass-rushers in NFL history, DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller. 

Mahomes ran to his right and kept getting farther and farther behind the line of scrimmage. He kept going back until he was maybe 15 or 20 yards behind the line. And then he jumped back and threw the ball in what seemed to be utter desperation, exactly the sort of pass that gets intercepted or falls short of the line of scrimmage and the QB is called for intentional grounding. Cue the announcer saying something like, "Well, that’s a rookie mistake."

Instead, the ball somehow sailed 30 yards and found receiver DeMarcus Robinson, who was covered by two defenders. It was such an impossible throw that two superb Kansas City Star writers — Sam Mellinger and the much-missed Terez Paylor — jumped out of their press box seats, a strict no-no for sportswriters. But what else could they do? "It was plainly unprofessional," Mellinger told writer Michael MacCambridge. "And I have no regrets."

The funny thing about watching that play on YouTube is this: It doesn’t look nearly as miraculous now as it did then. I mean, yes, of course, it’s a great play, no question about it. But even though it was only three years ago, Mahomes has changed the way we see the world. He has done so many extraordinary, ridiculous, incredible, impossible things — sidearm throws and tip-toe runs and flings back to the middle of the field — that this play might not even make the top 25 Patrick Mahomes highlights.

* * *

How soon can you declare an athlete an all-time great? That’s a fascinating discussion … and I should know because I have had it a dozen or so times since I told people that I was going to rank Mahomes the 101st greatest player in football history, even though he has played only 46 regular-season games.

Almost all of the people I talked to called me crazy — true greatness, they said, is defined by time. He hasn't played enough. He hasn’t proven enough. And I get that.

But then … how can you watch Patrick Mahomes play and not just know that he’s one of the greatest ever? There are some quantifiable measurements, of course, such as the fact that he’s the first NFL quarterback to lead a team to three conference championship games in his first three seasons. In those three seasons, he won one MVP award, finished third in the MVP voting one season and led his team to a Super Bowl title. His 108.7 passer rating is the highest in NFL history by a lot. His 114 touchdowns to 24 interceptions is a statistical absurdity.

"What happens," one person asked me, "if God forbid something happened and Patrick Mahomes could never play another down of football? You’re telling me that he’s still one of the 101 greatest players ever?"

Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Unquestionably. Because, in football, it’s about impact. 

Gale Sayers played only four full seasons in a seven-year career, but he’s an all-time great because there had never been a player quite like him. Earl Campbell had only three great seasons, but he’s an all-time great because there had never been a player quite like him. 

Mahomes has reinvented the quarterback position with his unparalleled vision, his accuracy and arm strength, his breathtaking creativity, his sense of the moment and his … well, I’m not sure there’s a word for that last piece.

"The best word I’ve found is ‘charisma,’" said Bill Curry, who played for Lombardi’s Packers, snapped the ball to Unitas and tried, with limited success, to block Deacon Jones. "It’s more than ‘charisma,’ but that’s the closest word to what separates the truly great ones. They bring the best out of everybody around them simply by being themselves."

The Pro Football 101 is filled with charismatic players who had something wordlessly special about them. Mahomes overflows with such charisma. He doesn’t just make everybody around him want to be better on the field. He makes people like us in the stands want to be better.

Mahomes did have a lousy Super Bowl in 2021. He looked out of sorts all game. Maybe it was the brilliant defensive scheme designed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, maybe it was the pressure of once again going up against Brady in a big game, maybe it was just one of those days when nothing seems to go right and you can’t quite figure out how to dig your way out of it.

Whatever the case, that game was enough — is enough — to create doubters. The doubters are never far away. And, honestly, Mahomes wasn’t at his best in his first Super Bowl either, so naturally, there will be those who wonder if he is destined to struggle in the biggest games.

Add that the Chiefs lost both of their starting tackles from last year’s team, and yes, of course, there will be those who say Mahomes will struggle without the first-class protection he’d been getting. The Bucs definitely found some defensive strategies that troubled Mahomes, so, yes, of course, there will be those who say the NFL has figured him out and he will never again be the same.

But I have to say, I don’t think doubts bother Patrick Mahomes. This is a guy who got settled in the NFL only after throwing his first interception. This is a guy many scouts thought would have real trouble adjusting to the NFL after he played in a goofy college offense, and he came out with one of the greatest rookie seasons in NFL history. 

This is a guy who says now that while losing the Super Bowl hurt a lot, it was probably the best thing that could have happened for him and the team going forward. 

"I think defeat helps you more than success," he said.

That’s a scary thought because Patrick Mahomes doesn’t lose much.

Joe Posnanski is a New York Times bestselling author and has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations. His new book, "The Baseball 100," comes out Sept. 28.