Andy Reid coached for the Mike Holmgren Packers, and led his own powerhouse teams, and won for four years in Kansas City before Patrick Mahomes was even on the roster. He’s in his 31st season in the NFL, and that followed a good run as a college assistant.
Bottom line, the 64-year-old Chiefs boss has been around a lot of good players.
How Reid explains where Mahomes is as a player, at 27 years old, carries weight. So his answer—when I asked him whether the quarterback may already be as good a player as he’s ever coached—is worth your attention.
“Yeah, I mean, listen, I would be saying ...” started Reid, as he sat on the Kansas City team plane, waiting for takeoff in Las Vegas. “I coached [Brett] Favre. I coached him, I coached Michael Vick, I coached Donovan McNabb. And this guy is right up there, and they all have their strengths and their weaknesses, but he’s a lot of fun to coach. He’s as good as it gets.”
How about an appreciation for Mahomes—before anyone starts taking him for granted?
The 2017 first-round pick is in his fifth year as a starter and is now one win away from his fifth AFC championship game. It’d also be his fifth AFC championship game at home, and with Saturday’s 31–13 win over the Raiders, Kansas City locked up the conference’s No. 1 seed for the third time in Mahomes’s five years. He has also thrown for more than 4,500 yards and 35 touchdowns in four of those five years. The exception came in ’19 due to injury.
And how about, with all that history in mind, we end the drama and give Mahomes—the guy who reached the top of the league at his position right away, has stayed there for a half decade now and already has his Hall of Fame coach comparing him to all-time greats—the second MVP of his career.
It’s become clear this year how rare what Mahomes has done is, and how readily apparent I think it should be that this is the year he wins MVP. Why, then, would it be this year over the others?
Consider what’s happened around Mahomes. After he took a beating in Super Bowl LV against the Buccaneers, the Chiefs completely revamped their offensive line, and Mahomes took it upon himself in 2021 to help that group work through some pretty significant bumps early in the year. Then, earlier this year, the Chiefs off-loaded Tyreek Hill and revamped his crew of wideouts—their top two producers at the position this year, three of the top four, and four of the top six weren’t on the team last year.
Yet, Mahomes barely has missed a beat. And to Reid, that was about more than just Mahomes’s singular greatness, which, of course, is a factor. It was also about what Mahomes did when Reid gave him the first two weeks of the offseason program, when players can’t do football things by rule at the team facility, to gather his new skill group in Dallas.
In fact, when I asked Reid to make the case for Mahomes as MVP (as if that would be needed), it’s the first thing he brought up.
“Maybe the best thing he did was take all those guys down to Texas and get to know them, and that helped him when they came back, kinda being on the same page, at least on the fundamental stuff,” Reid says. “And then we were able to add our new stuff in, and he had a relationship with these guys where he would tell them what to do and they respected that. So I think his leadership—just overall leadership—has been astronomical.
“And then his play on the field, he obviously has made some spectacular plays, knows where everybody’s at, knows when to move, when to stay in the pocket. He’s gotten better with that every year.”
He had a few spectacular moments Saturday in an efficient 202-yard afternoon in which the Chiefs rushed for 168 yards and controlled play from start to finish. One incredible play came on third-and-goal from the Raiders’ 4, three plays after he climbed the pocket to drop a 67-yard bomb to Justin Watson. On the play, Mahomes was chased to his left by star pass rusher Maxx Crosby, and ran to the sideline, looking for an outlet against his body.
And sure enough, through a mass of bodies, he found Jerick McKinnon, another veteran revitalized playing for Reid and with Mahomes, and leisurely flipped the ball to him—giving us another example of sublime play that he’s, somehow, made look routine. When I asked Reid about the impromptu shovel pass, one that required a lot more creativity, vision and body control than people may realize, the coach big-pictured his answer.
“I mean, the expectations are so high, and he exceeds them,” Reid says. “My hat goes off to the kid. And he does it with a smile on his face.”
That brought Reid to the amazing twist to all this—where other quarterbacks may grouse over losing a guy such as Hill, Mahomes used it as an opportunity to improve as a quarterback, learning to better play point guard after years of leaning on the burner and Travis Kelce.
“That’s the part of the equation that people didn’t talk much about—they talked about how it hurt Pat, not how it helped Pat in a way that he would have to grow in different directions,” Reid says. “That’s what he did. And he knew it. He knew what he had to do, so he jumped in, and you gotta give him credit for that. He jumped feet first and helped teach those kids. Made them feel a part of it, and Kelce did, too.”
The result may be Mahomes’s finest season.
And look, I love what Joe Burrow’s done in Cincinnati, where he’s elbowed his way into the conversation for best quarterback in the league—I think he’s the closest thing to Tom Brady stylistically since Brady came into the league. Ditto on Josh Allen, who’s amazing, and lifts his team up in a way no other quarterback can.
But based on what we’ve seen the past four months, I think the debate is done.
Mahomes is the MVP.
Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union/USA TODAY NETWORK
Josh Allen, the Jaguars defensive end (not the Bills quarterback), has seen a lot.
Over the past four years, he’s had four head coaches, three defensive coordinators and three defensive line coaches. He’s twice played for the worst team in the league, and in one of those years, saw it lead to another guy coming in at his position. He spent more than a month last year working for an interim coach. He heard his name bandied about in trade rumors in October, when it sure looked like this would be another lost season in Jacksonville.
So what happened Saturday night, with his big play coming in a roaring comeback, to land the Jags a sixth win in seven games, and lock down the Jaguars’ first AFC South crown in five years (and just second since 2000) was plenty satisfying for Allen.
“It definitely was,” he says. “To this point, man, it hasn’t hit me yet, because I’m so focused on going to the next opportunity, getting my body back right to where I need to be so we can focus on next week. We got a good opportunity. We’re in the playoffs now, and we need to be 100% going into this matchup. And that’s really what I’m focused about. We knew we were gonna win that game. We expected to win that game.
“And we expect to win the next one—whoever we play.”
The confidence isn’t misplaced. It was, in fact, there even when things looked bleakest, around Thanksgiving. And that’s a big part of how coach Doug Pederson and his staff somehow pulled this off, with Saturday’s 20–16 win over the Titans completing a run in which a 3–7 team caught a 7–3 team. Jacksonville passed Tennessee over a seven-week period—with the Jaguars winning the AFC South by two full games—as the Titans finished the season losing seven consecutive games.
But when things were at their lowest, summoning that confidence couldn’t have been easy.
Allen, for one, had gone 13–46 as a pro, and had seen just about everything fail, from the circling of the drain of the Doug Marrone era to the chaos of the Urban Meyer era, to early stumbles for the current regime. But somehow, he, and the guys around him, thought things could be different this time around.
“We’re not the same-old Jags, that was really the message, like we’re a better team than we’ve been, than I’ve ever been a part of here,” Allen says. “And we were better than what we showed. And we knew we were better than that, so it was really like, we’re not that team. We’re not going to be that team. We weren’t gonna accept the laughingstock thing—when you play us, you’re gonna have to really come down here and play.
“That’s the mentality that we’ve always had and we always stood fast on it.”
Which is why Pederson told the guys in the locker room after the game that Saturday night against the Titans played out like a microcosm of their season.
It started with the Titans, and third-string quarterback Josh Dobbs, masterfully managing the first quarter and a half (and converting two fourth-and-3s), to jump to a 10–0 lead. Trevor Lawrence & Co. did bring an emphatic answer to the Titans’ first touchdown, with a long Jamal Agnew return setting up a quick, six-play, 50-yard drive—a Lawrence dime to Christian Kirk capped it. But from there, and through two three-and-outs to start the fourth quarter, it became clear that the Jags’ defense would need to play a bigger role on this night.
It started with handling Derrick Henry, who rushed for 71 yards on 17 carries in the first half. Jacksonville held him to 38 yards on 13 carries after the break. “We had to play football,” Allen says. “We had to be more physical than them. We had to stop the run, and we had to create pressure.”
With the run stopped, the pressure would come, with Allen bringing it, and like the Jaguars’ season, the game would turn at the end.
It first happened on a Titans third-and-6, from the Tennessee 35 with 3:01 left. On the play, Allen dropped into coverage, and Rayshawn Jenkins came free on the opposite side, getting a clean shot on Dobbs and jarring the ball free. To the rest of us watching, it looked like it might be an incomplete pass. But Allen had only one thought when he saw the ball bouncing toward the sideline he was covering—Go.
“That goes back to being in high school,” says Allen, who told me his last touchdown actually came as a high school receiver. “Whenever the ball’s on the ground, you go get the ball and score. We don’t want to put the game into the officials’ hands. You want to dictate the game, and for Rayshawn, it was [Foye Oluokun] in the game, he took the tackle with him, gave [Jenkins] a short hedge he needed to make a play. When his number was called, he made that play. And for me, at that moment, being where I needed to be.
“Everybody’s being where they need to be, and that’s why that play was so successful.”
Then, just after the two-minute warning, Allen was where he needed to be again. The Titans had driven into Jacksonville territory, down 16–13. On second-and-7, Allen helped close out the visitors, strip-sacking Dobbs, and creating a third-and-long situation that led to a game-ending turnover on downs.
And so Allen, and the Jags, had their capstone on a season, with a game that didn’t look so good at the half, but was a work of art for the home crowd at the end. Which, really, summarized how Pederson addressed his team afterward.
“Man, we didn’t start fast,” Allen says. “It wasn’t the way we planned it to go. But we gonna finish hard. I think that’s been the message this whole year is to just finish. Start fast and finish faster. No matter how you start the game, it’s all about how you finish it. When that clock goes zero, zero, zero and we win, it doesn't matter. So I think that’s what [Pederson] meant. That’s the message that we took from it, and we’re not done yet.”
Unbelievably, they sure aren’t.
Jamie Sabau/USA TODAY Sports
The play is one you wouldn’t notice, but, really, it looked so easy that it was exactly what Bears coach Matt Eberflus and his offensive coordinator, Luke Getsy, wanted to see.
It was third-and-10 against the vaunted Eagles, who’d won four straight, and after rookie tackle Braxton Jones had taken a false start to knock Chicago off schedule on the game’s third play from scrimmage. The ball was snapped to Justin Fields in the shotgun. Fields took a short drop, hit his plant foot and spun one on time to receiver Equanimeous St. Brown, over the middle, and St. Brown turned upfield for a 20-yard gain.
“He did a great job of just dropping back, hitting his back foot and hitting EQ on an in-cut,” said Eberflus from his office Saturday. “It was a beautiful pass to keep the drive alive. Obviously, we’ve done a really good job of scoring on first drives—we’re like tops in the league at scoring on our first drives of the game. And that was a big play for him. You can certainly see the growth in him. The rhythm and timing of that play was awesome.”
The overriding message of the play? This is going to get easier for Fields. And when it does, look out.
The Bears had shut Fields down for Week 18, thanks to a sore hip, but they did so with a new coach and GM having learned a lot about their 23-year-old quarterback. He finished the season with modest passing numbers (2,242 yards, 17 TDs, 11 INTs), outrageous rushing numbers (1,143 yards), with a lot of room to grow, and a lot of questions to answer. So I figured with Fields’s season complete, this’d be a good chance to get a status check on the former Buckeye.
Here’s a bit of my Saturday morning conversation with Eberflus on his young quarterback.
MMQB: So can we look back at your starting point with Justin?
ME: We started the year off—everybody had a fresh start. And then, really, with Justin, it was a point of Let’s bring him in; let’s figure out what his mental aptitude is. Is he sharp? Is he crisp? Can he rip the calls? Can he remember the concepts and all that? Because you really don’t know until you start working with the guy. He checked all those boxes. He’s so smart. He’s able to understand concepts, understand protections, move the protection around to make sure he’s squared away. And so that part of it is, the mental side of it, was great.
And then the physical side of it, again, you watch tape—Luke and I watched tape on him, and obviously we asked a lot of our friends about him that have either evaluated him coming out of college or just have worked with him in the past at Ohio State, just to get a feel for the guy and a feel for his skill set. And once we got a handle on that, then you’re able to really work at his fundamental craft of playing quarterback.
And what was that? And that really was, for him, being in balance, throwing from a good platform and delivering the ball on time. And that’s the things that he’s improved most on this year and throughout the course of the year.
MMQB: Did you have to balance leveraging Justin’s ability with managing the hits he took?
ME: No doubt. And I think it’s the style and the types of runs that you use with him, too. I think it’s important to have all those things dialed in, because you obviously want to make sure that he’s working toward the sidelines and he’s getting out of bounds and not taking any unwanted hits. So we want to make sure that we do that and keep him out of harm’s way, and for the most part, he did that. He’s still learning to do that, and again, how many times you do it, when, is very important. We want to do it in the critical situations where it’s third down or two-minute or red-zone-type plays. Certainly, he’s got some unscripted ones where he just will do his thing—which obviously is where there were some historic things that he did this year. But yeah, you just gotta be smart about how you do it.
MMQB: Your wow moment with him this year?
ME: It was third down, and we were playing Detroit for the first time at Soldier Field. And he scrambled to the right and scrambled to the left and made about four guys miss, and then he just … just an insane run that he had to score that touchdown. But there’s been some amazing ones. There’ve been so many of them where I’ll walk down and talk to Luke, and we just look at each other like and say, Wow. That’s all we say. There’s a lot of those Wow moments for sure.
MMQB: So where do you see his potential as a passer?
ME: It’s very high. His potential is very high. What he does well is he throws outside the numbers really well and he also throws the go-ball and deep passes well. I mean, he’s very accurate on a deep pass. You can see that through the course of the year. He dropped one in to [Darnell] Mooney back at the New York Giants. He’s hit a lot of go-balls and outside-the-number passes, where he’s developing the inside-breaking routes and the rhythm and timing of that, and the intermediate pass. And that’s where he’s developing. He’s gotten a lot better, and he’s gonna continue to get better. To me, the ceiling on that is as high as we’re gonna take it. You never put a ceiling on a player. You never put a cap on a player, and he’s gonna take it where he can.
MMQB: And along those lines, I’d guess putting his body on the line has helped accelerate his growth as a leader, just with the respect he’ll get for it?
ME: There’s no doubt. And he’s got so much grit and so much toughness and loves the game. So that’s the first thing that we talk about with all the players—does he love football and show it every day? And he does that. Every day in practice. Every game he plays in. And, man, he is as tough as there is. People follow that. People follow the example he sets, and as he’s gotten more success during the course of the year, he’s certainly opened up and started to lead with his words as well.
***
Eberflus and I finished up on this story I’d heard on Fields from the offseason, where the coaches gave the players the week off. Not only did Fields come in that week, but he gathered trainers and weight-room staff to play receiver for him so he could throw at the facility. The Bears’ coach confirmed it.
“He pulled all the trainers out and the equipment guys out, and he’s out there,” Eberflus says. “I don’t think it was that warm out that day, either. It was pretty chilly, and he’s out here ripping routes to them. It was pretty cool to see. He’s done that a couple times, but he’s always working. Like after practice, every practice, he’s out there for 45 minutes and all the receivers are out there, tight ends are out there and they’re all running routes and working on the passing game. So he works very, very hard at it.”
Which, it would seem, is another really important piece of a puzzle that is just now starting to come together.
