The untold stories of Patrick Mahomes’ first start, and what it means 5 years later

The first time Patrick Mahomes threw a no-look pass in practice, the only other person sure of what he’d just done was the man on the receiving end of it.

And he could only be pretty sure.

It came on a slant pattern, which might be the lone reason Marcus Kemp, then a rookie receiver sharing scout-team duties with Mahomes, was even ready for it. The throws on those routes tend to come in hot.

Mahomes had jerked his head toward a running back in the flat, stared him down a bit, and then suddenly fired instead to Kemp.

“One of my claims to fame,” Kemp said this week, “is I caught the first one.”

Mahomes hadn’t been looking at Kemp when he made that throw during a 2017 drill — Kemp was certain of it.

Well, kind of. It was one of those things that was so hard to believe — let alone convince his teammates — that after practice, the wide receivers immediately flipped on the film of the play. And it’s worthwhile to point out that the Chiefs do not spend much time watching back reps of the scout team.

But this one?

“We all wanted to run it back,” Kemp said, “just to be sure he just did what I thought he just did.”

This was about two practices into the regular season schedule, Kemp recalled, and a collection of wide receivers on a team that would become a division champion were huddled around a screen, watching a replay clip of the backup quarterback.

Over. And over. And over again.

“You saw these glimpses of some of what he does now. Like, ‘Man, he just did this in practice; he just did that in practice,’” said Greg Lewis, then the team’s wide receivers coach who now leads the running back room.

“And you’re sitting there, thinking,” Lewis adds before placing his hand on his chin and offering a sly grin.

“I wonder if he could do it in a game.”

The prep work

On Sunday afternoon, the Chiefs will play host to the Denver Broncos having already clinched their seventh straight AFC West title. They’re still in the mix for the No. 1 seed in the AFC, still in the mix to make the conference championship game come through Kansas City for a fifth straight year. It’s almost easy to forget that this kind of thing didn’t used to happen often around here.

Or, you know, like ever.

And then this guy came around.

In 2017, the Chiefs jumped up to No. 10 in the NFL Draft and selected Mahomes, anticipatory of their future even as Alex Smith remained the immediate present.

Ultimately, it would set up the most meaningful meaningless game in Chiefs history. On the final day of the 2017 season, the Chiefs had locked up the No. 4 seed in the AFC. Couldn’t move up. Couldn’t move down.

So they decided to give the kid a shot. Why not? Mahomes, then a 22-year-old rookie, had spent the season as Smith’s backup, though he didn’t throw even one pass in the initial 16 weeks.

Week 17 was all his.

The entirety of the coaching staff, however, was not.

The postseason loomed one week later, so head coach Andy Reid assigned half of his staff to playoff preparation, with the other half reserved for Week 17 and Mahomes.

Reid took the quarterback.

You know, first dibs and all.

“I could see that Coach was really intrigued by this kid,” said Matt Nagy, then the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator and now the man who returned as quarterbacks coach after a head coaching stint in Chicago. “You could just see the excitement from Coach, doing everything from Monday game-planning to lining up the best reads to blitz pickup to calling plays for him on Sunday. I just remember how cool it was to see his excitement.”

Five years into his career, Mahomes remains meticulous about this part of the preparation, a trait he says he learned from playing behind Smith. That’s a theme in the interviews for this column, by the way — how frequently all Involved credit Smith for how that 2017 New Year’s Eve game unfolded. Or at least what led to it.

In any event, Mahomes has developed into one of the league’s elite quarterbacks against the blitz — so elite that teams have virtually stopped trying.

But he’d arrived in Kansas City in 2017 carrying the burden of an Air Raid offense that more than a handful of scouts had all but avoided, determining that particularly style of quarterback didn’t have a place in the NFL. The evidence came in the form of his predecessors, and it was compelling.

A secret: That wasn’t completely untrue with Mahomes, either. Handed a significantly more vast playbook than he’d ever held, he would later admit, “When I first got in the preseason that first year, I was so focused on getting us in the right position and getting the offense lined up that I wasn’t even worried about what the defense was doing.”

Five months later, as he prepared for his first career start, Mahomes sat in a meeting that covered blitz packages. Reid had peppered him with questions, and there’s one moment from that gathering that has stuck with Eric Bieniemy, then the running backs coach who would soon be promoted to offensive coordinator.

It wasn’t that Mahomes answered a question correctly.

It was that he practically finished Reid’s sentence.

And if this linebacker comes?

This guy is the read.

“That was like a preemptive moment,” Bieniemy said. “Where you sit back and say, OK, now that’s pretty good right there.”

Game day

There’s a play from that game five years ago that has received most of the attention within Mahomes’ debut. He’s flooding to his right — and so deep in the pocket that some of his coaches were literally yelling for him to throw it away — before he launched a ball toward the middle of the field that somehow found receiver Demarcus Robinson for a first down.

If you were watching that day, that pass from the final drive of a 27-24 win is probably the one you remember.

To coaches, the moment came much earlier.

Just three plays in.

After a pair of incomplete passes to open the game — throws that might have had just a bit too much juice behind them — Mahomes dropped straight into the pocket on third and 10. From his own 5-yard line, he sent a bullet to tight end Demetrius Harris near the 40, and the freeze frame on the throw shows it just beyond the fingertips of one defender, into the outstretched arms of Harris and just underneath inside the top defender.

It is, by all measures, a strike.

“That’s the throw that you’re like, ‘Yeah, this dude can do some stuff out here,’” Lewis said.

The throws are what we notice. The details are what his coaches teammates spotted. Bieniemy referenced the communication.

But there are other points, too.

“I think just everything operations-wise — both pre-snap and post-snap was very polished, and it was really impressive from what I remember him being in the preseason,” former Chiefs right tackle Mitchell Schwartz said.

For example?

“As a tackle, you get worried that the quarterback is going to hang onto the ball for awhile or set up super deep in the pocket, but none of that happened,” Schwartz said. “Everything was crisp and smooth.”

The Broncos played with the bulk of their starters that afternoon. Mahomes played with backups, save Schwartz, who preserved a consecutive-snaps streak. Heck, after Kareem Hunt ran the ball just one time to secure the NFL’s rushing title, fullback Anthony Sherman eventually took over as the bell-cow back.

In fact, among the 16 players to take at least one offensive snap that day, just one is still on the Chiefs’ roster.

Mahomes.

Only three others who played any snaps that day — offensive, defensive or special teams — remain in the Kansas City locker room: Mahomes, defensive tackle Chris Jones, kicker Harrison Butker and long-snapper James Winchester.

Playing alongside mostly backups, and playing against mostly starters, Mahomes would help the Chiefs build a 24-10 lead — with Mahomes finding Albert Wilson 10 times for 147 yards.

“Starters aren’t playing; backups are in; so I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I wonder if we’ll be punting the ball a little more today,’” Winchester recalled.

“Yeah, that wasn’t the case.”

At one point midway through the fourth quarter, sensing Mahomes had all but wrapped up a win in his first NFL game, Nagy approached Reid with a suggestion. Third-string quarterback Tyler Bray had been on the team for a few years, but he never once had the opportunity to actually play in a game.

“What do you think about going with Tyler to finish the game?” Nagy asked Reid.

On Bray’s first snap, a fumbled handoff was scooped up by the Broncos and returned for a touchdown. On the ensuing possession, the Chiefs went three-and-out, and then the Broncos marched down field and tied the game.

“Oh, crap,” Nagy recalled thinking.

“I’m in trouble.”

The drive

Nagy heard Mahomes before he saw him.

The game had unraveled in the span of about five minutes, and there was Mahomes, begging his offensive coordinator to let him back in the game.

This staff would come to learn this was indicative of his personality — a game that, technically, meant nothing, and he insisted on taking the next drive.

“He just said, ‘Hey, you want me back in,’ Nagy said. “Said he’d go back in and help win the game.

“And then he went down and did it.”

It was 17 degrees, mind you, and Mahomes had never been removed from a game altogether only to re-enter it later. This was a first. In many ways.

Mahomes has led 12 game-winning drives in his NFL career, and we share stories about his speeches on the sideline preceding them or other key moments. “Let’s do something special” has been branded across T-shirts.

But his first game-winning drive?

Not a one-liner from him but rather to him. As they waited on the sideline for the ensuing possession, Albert Wilson, the Chiefs’ leading receiver in that game, turned to Mahomes.

“We’re about to go down there and score,” Wilson said.

Butker recalled moving to the kicking net early in the drive.

“I felt pretty good he was going to get us down there,” Butker said.

The Chiefs took possession with just under three minutes to play. Mahomes had the memorable throw to Robinson over the middle while rolling right.

Then he went for it all, lofting a pass deep over the middle to Harris. It fell incomplete. Afterward, Schwartz, the lone regular starter out there with Mahomes, approached him, put two hands on his chest and delivered what he thought would be a useful reminder.

“I remember going up to him and telling him to be smart; we just need a field goal,” Schwartz said. “I thought I was being a good veteran. Looking back on it, I’m sure he was like, ‘You idiot. I know what I’m doing.’”

A play later, one final completion to Wilson put the Chiefs in field-goal range. Butker drilled it from 30 yards out.

In one chance, Mahomes had become the first quarterback drafted by the Chiefs to win a game for the franchise since Todd Blackledge in 1987.

Thirty years.

“I’m just gonna say it,” Bieniemy said. “That was some good (stuff).”

To clarify, he did not say stuff.

The aftermath

There’s a little bit of the-rest-is-history to the remainder of the narrative.

A game in Denver provided a moment in which the Chiefs didn’t think, hope, predict or suspect they had their guy.

They knew.

They traded Smith to Washington three months later, opening the job for Mahomes. He would win the league’s Most Valuable Player award in his first year as a starter, and then lead the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl championship in a half-century one year after that. He’s on track to win another MVP this year.

It’s not only possible but overwhelmingly likely that Mahomes becomes Mahomes whether he throws those 35 passes in Denver as a rookie, or even if he throws none at all.

But they weren’t meaningless.

“There’s the unknown when you only see it in practice, because it’s the NFL,” Nagy said. “You know, it’s never known with young guys what you’re going to get with the first game.

“I think what we saw from him, from that first game, is the moment was never too big for him.”

Having seemingly given his final answer of an interview, Nagy began to walk away. Then, a parting shot.

“And I think it’s safe to say that’s still true today.”