At Texas Tech, vision of Arizona coach Kliff Kingsbury enabled Patrick Mahomes’ career

Preposterous as it might seem now, football was regarded as Patrick Mahomes’ third-best sport behind baseball and basketball as he was entering his junior year at Whitehouse (Texas) High.

Heck, his prowess in those sports is why you can see elements of shortstop and guard play in his mesmerizing arsenal with the Chiefs.

But that dynamic also helps explain why he was absurdly underrecruited … and why he was at a crossroads in his athletic career at the time.

Part of why he was neglected as a football prospect is that many schools believed he was destined to play pro baseball. With good reason, in fact, since he was contemplating quitting football after his sophomore year rather than risk an injury that could ruin his baseball career.

Part of his low profile was because he wasn’t on the so-called “circuit” of football camps that lure recruiters and the sort of early attention that ramps up the hype machines.

Oh, and also: Mahomes wasn’t even the starting quarterback at Whitehouse when that season opened. To that point, the University of Texas and some others were looking at him as a safety prospect.

“Maybe I could have played defensive back,” Mahomes said Wednesday, smiling as he noted he was around 6-foot-2, 180 pounds at the time and had about six interceptions. “You never know.”

We do know, though, that he seems born to be an NFL quarterback.

And with baseball ever-looming and his game not yet developed, that’s something that may not have happened if not for that fateful junior year of high school.

First of all, because he emerged as the starter early in the season.

But also because Arizona Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury became captivated with Mahomes soon after he took over at Texas Tech in 2012, lasering in on the raw player he’d seen on tape as a junior when Kingsbury was Texas A&M’s offensive coordinator.

Thanks to Adam Cook, then Whitehouse’s offensive coordinator and a former Tech walk-on, it was a nice indulgence of fate that Mahomes was in the Air Raid system Kingsbury had played in and would favor at Tech … and could easily see Mahomes fitting in.

So Kingsbury, perhaps the right person at the right time, had a specific vision of what Mahomes could be when so many others only had tunnel vision about him one way or another.

“Everybody who came through here and recruited has to be kicking themselves,” Cook said by telephone on Thursday. “What was it they were looking for?”

What Kingsbury saw soon after watching video presented by A&M offensive line coach B.J. Anderson before promptly pouncing after he took over at Tech.

“As soon as he got the job at Tech (in December 2012), that’s when he started really courting Patrick,” Cook said, later adding, “He was the one guy out of all of them who saw Patrick, what was in him, the potential there. And ended up going all-in on him.”

When I asked Mahomes on Wednesday about Tech being among the first to recruit him as a quarterback, he said, “They were really the first and only.”

While it’s understood that Houston and Rice later made offers, Mahomes thought about how Kingsbury swarmed him and his family and otherwise conveyed his belief in him.

“That’s the reason I’m in this position (today),” he said. “He gave me that chance.”

And that’s the reason this NFL opener at Arizona on Sunday comes with a particularly intriguing subplot: Mahomes for the first time goes against fourth-year Cardinals coach Kingsbury, a mentor who was a crucial influence at a pivotal point in his career.

It also might be surmised that Mahomes, among other notable quarterbacks coached by Kingsbury, had some role in Kingsbury being hired for this job. After all, Mahomes won the NFL MVP in his first season as a starter in 2018; Tech fired Kingsbury after six seasons that November, and the Cardinals hired him in early 2019.

All of which makes for this being “a little surreal” going against Mahomes, Kingsbury told reporters in Arizona earlier in the week. Mahomes reckoned the same on Wednesday.

As much as anything else, maybe that’s because of the roles each has played in each other’s success.

In fact, the Chiefs in this perfect marriage with Mahomes also owe much to Kingsbury.

Coach Andy Reid called Kingsbury’s input about Mahomes “one of the reasons that we went after Patrick as hard as we did.” Asked about any specifics Kingsbury might have conveyed, Reid deadpanned, “He told me he’s good.”

Meanwhile, Mahomes and Kingsbury remain connected, including in a Texas Tech group text thread and by seeing each other every so often in the offseason. The ongoing relationship is evident in everything from Mahomes texting Kingsbury a cryptic eyes emoji when he got early word that this would be the opener to Kingsbury rooting for Mahomes at Super Bowl LIV.

(Kingsbury also bought Cook a ticket for the game after hearing he had hoped to go but couldn’t afford it.)

“It was high stress watching it,’’ Kingsbury said at the 2020 NFL Combine, adding that it felt like “a little brother type of deal and you don’t have any control.”

As he spoke that day, Kingsbury alluded to how the Chiefs had been so ahead of others on Mahomes: They traded up for the No. 10 overall pick in the 2017 NFL Draft even as some scoffed about his future after a collegiate career in which the defensively dismal Red Raiders were 13-19 in games he started.

Since then, of course, Mahomes has been nothing less than a phenomenon, leading the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl in 50 years and four straight AFC Championship Game berths.

“They nailed it,” Kingsbury said. “They had targeted Pat after his sophomore year, when nobody even knew who he was.”

That roughly paralleled Tech and Kingsbury’s track on Mahomes early in his junior year, when Kingsbury became intrigued by tape of Mahomes.

Nevermind that he “didn’t look like maybe a traditional quarterback would look,” Kingsbury told reporters in Arizona, between his footwork and releases. To say nothing of his off-script success that even had Cook and other Whitehouse coaches questioning “how far do we let him go” ... only to find trust in him well-placed.

Whether despite or because of all that, Mahomes was consistently the best player on the field. Typically by a lot. And when Kingsbury became head coach at Tech, he believed Mahomes would fit what they were trying to do.

“I could see what I thought he could be,” he said, including in an uncanny ability to extend plays that he didn’t think anybody would have guessed he’d still be able to pull off at the NFL level.

He also understood that Mahomes had remarkable intelligence and great accuracy as he was.

So even if he worked to subtly refine elements of his game, he didn’t try to mold Mahomes into something he wasn’t.

Often, Mahomes said, coaches working with young quarterbacks “kind of restrict them and (want to) make them be this model of how the quarterback position is supposed to be played.”

As Mahomes put it, though, Kingsbury had the presence of mind to think in terms of, “ ‘Hey, let’s maximize your strength.’ ”

So he would teach him here and there about mechanics and fundamentals and using the pocket. But …

“He never restricted who I was,” Mahomes said.

Sound familiar?

“I think that’s kind of obviously amplified with Coach Reid now,” he said.

Largely because Kingsbury was discerning when the issue of baseball and Mahomes’ unconventional style were keeping others away.

“It’s those circumstances and just little things like that happening that kind of put Patrick’s story all together,” Cook said.

Had he gone elsewhere, Mahomes said, he might well have been forced to be what he called, yikes, “this pocket quarterback who kind of had the right fundamentals.”

“But (Kingsbury) let me be who I was, kind of on and off the field,” he said. “And that helped me become the player that I am.”

From when he was in high school as what even Mahomes called “a baseball player trying to play football” to a convergence Sunday neither could have anticipated back at Tech.

Kingsbury might know a few of his tricks, Mahomes said, smiling. But he also feels like he’s grown a lot since they were together there.

Compete as they will for what Mahomes playfully called “bragging rights for the rest of time,” it’s also true that Mahomes views this as “an awesome moment that we’ll have forever.”

Because of the essential role of each in getting the other here.