Kliff Kingsbury has long been known as the guy who saw it in Patrick Mahomes before pretty much anyone else outside of East Texas did.
But … this?
Even he’ll stop short of saying he saw this coming.
“I just knew that I’d never seen anything like it, the arm talent, the awareness, the pocket presence, the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head-type stuff,” Kingsbury said over the phone, coming out of a coaches meeting at USC on Tuesday. “I remember talking to Andy [Reid before the draft] and he said, ‘What do you think?’ I just said, ‘He’s the best I’ve seen. I’ve never seen anything like it. If you were going to take a chance on one guy your entire career, this would be the guy that you’d take a chance on.’
“Luckily, he’s proved me right. And then some.”
Here is the then some: Mahomes is headed into his seventh NFL season, not just having proved his college coach’s hyperbolic statements of spring 2017 right—he’s exceeded them by becoming, really, the unquestioned best player in football. So much so that last year the guy many would rank second, the one who’s probably been the biggest thorn in Mahomes’s side (that’s Joe Burrow), conceded, “I don’t think there is any argument now. It’s Pat.”
Our annual quarterback poll has, once again, borne that out.
As Burrow said, it’s Pat and everyone else.
Denny Medley/USA TODAY Sports
Mahomes didn’t just win the poll for a fourth straight year; he appeared on every single ballot, he gobbled up 71 of 80 first-place votes and he was first or second for every single voter. And rightfully so—he’s won the AFC West and made it to the AFC championship game in all five of his years as a starter, played in three Super Bowls and won two. With his 28th birthday still 10 days away, he stands alone with Tom Brady and Joe Montana as one of three players in NFL history to have multiple Super Bowl and regular-season MVP trophies.
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So even if you’re measuring this against what Kingsbury, who had Mahomes for three years at Texas Tech, said to Reid, Mahomes’s résumé looks like one of his off-balance throws—so spectacular you’d almost think it’s fake. But it’s most assuredly not, and the scary thing is we may still be on the front end of what Mahomes will end up accomplishing in the NFL.
Welcome into our annual start-of-the-season quarterback poll.
For those of you who are new to this, I’ll lay out the parameters. There are two hallmarks to this exercise that, I think, make it different. One, it is done in full between the day after the final roster cutdown and the Thursday night opener. And, two, voters are asked to project not who the best guys are now, but who the best guys will be at the end of the season.
To get it done, I sent texts out to more than 100 folks at the end of last week who, in some way, work with the quarterbacks for their teams or evaluate them at the pro level—head coaches, offensive coordinators, pass-game coordinators, quarterbacks coaches, general managers, assistant GMs, vice presidents and directors of players personnel, and pro scouting directors—and asked them, simply, for who will be in the top five come January.
I’ve kept the number at five because I want to narrow it down to players whom NFL people think have a chance to be in the upper reaches of the position within the context of the season ahead.
Over the last six days, I got 80 ballots back, and there’s representation in this vote from all 32 teams. As you’ll see, 14 guys garnered votes, and the pool happens to skew young this year—Mahomes is actually the sixth-oldest guy on the list, meaning nine of 14 vote-getters are 27 or younger. Also, the top three are basically on their own tiers, with a pretty clear top six established and then another drop-off after the top eight.
But again, the top takeaway for me is how Mahomes has separated himself from the pack as he tries to lead a Kansas City repeat. And I figured Kingsbury (now an offensive assistant under Lincoln Riley at USC) would be a pretty good guy to gauge how we should all view the quarterback’s ascension, from the keys to getting to here, to just how far Mahomes has come.
Let’s dive into how this has happened, through the eyes of a guy who’s known Mahomes since he was a precocious teenager …
He’s unconventional. Of course, you know that. But what you might not know is that those around him attribute it to an old-school upbringing at the position—devoid of having been attached to a personal coach in elementary school or being carted around to dozens of college camps starting in middle school. He was a three-sport athlete. He learned to throw as a baseball player. He learned to compete in different arenas.
“It’s like, Yeah, it doesn’t look like I’ve seen it look before, but it’s very accurate. He has great touch, he has an insane arm, he can make throws falling backwards, rolling over the middle, late over the middle,” Kingsbury says. “All the things you were taught growing up as a player and even as a coach not to do, he can do it. He can do it effectively and consistently. You definitely learned to let the reins go sometimes and let him be the player that he is. …
“He throws the ball differently. His footwork’s different, the arm angles. It was never, You have to put your toe this way or you have to carry the ball this way. When he had a ball in his hands, he liked to make plays. He liked to just spin it. He experimented with different things in the way he played because he was never overly trained in any way.”
The incubators he’s entered into have been ideal. Kingsbury says now that his own experience working with Johnny Manziel a year and a half before Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech in 2014 was exactly what he needed as a precursor to coaching Mahomes. “It was perfect timing for me as a young coach. … [Manziel] didn’t always look like it was supposed to look, didn’t always get to the proper reads or things of that nature, but he was the best player on the field. You had to give some leeway. … I had a feel for that.”
From there, he not only let Mahomes be Mahomes, he conveyed how he handled Mahomes to Reid. (“To Andy’s credit, he said, ‘I like when he goes into that mode because good things usually happen.’”) In turn, Reid set up not only the right environment for Mahomes to develop in, with a redshirt year taken behind a true pro in Alex Smith, but the right plan for how to coach and use him when he was ready to play.
“You combine his freestyle way of playing the game where he didn’t go to all these football camps, wasn’t overcoached or overtrained, so he still just kind of played the way that he played,” Kingsbury says. “Andy let it continue that way, but honed in on everything else.”
And one area where Reid has honed Mahomes’s ability, and his ethos, has been in how he manages the game. The NFL is different from college in how situational football, and winning on the margins, so often adds up to the difference between winning and losing—and that’s one area where Reid had to tame that bucking bronco of a quarterback that Mahomes was coming into the league.
It’s in those areas now that Kingsbury sees the biggest difference in his former quarterback.
“Hearing from his mouth but also watching him play the game, he’s so big on not taking first- and second-down sacks now,” Kingsbury says. “He thinks that completion percentage is one of the most overrated stats in sports because he thinks, My job is to keep my team on schedule. If I’m taking sacks on first and second down, then I’m putting my team at a huge disadvantage. In that league, on third down, teams pin their ears back. Third-and-longs are hard to get.
“When you watch his two to three throws per game where he knows where his throwaways are at, he’s literally jumping up in the pocket to throw it away at somebody’s feet or out of bounds. Those are the huge steps that I’ve seen in his growth, just knowing when the party’s over and knowing when to get it out of his hand and not take sacks.”
That point about completion percentage brings you back to how the person and player Mahomes is has aided in his growth on the margins. As Kingsbury alluded to, some quarterbacks don’t like throwaways because they’re acutely aware of their completion percentage. And as those who know the guy best will tell you, that’s just one area where Mahomes flashes what’s most important to him, as a player.
“That’s kind of always how he’s been,” Kingsbury says. “If he threw a pass six inches behind a guy, but the guy obviously should have caught it, he’d be like, My bad. I’ll get it out in front. That’s the type of competitor he is and who he’s been. When it comes to team-first stuff, the guy that I’ve known is the guy still out there. If I got to throw it away, let’s throw it away because it’s my job to help us win games and get us in the end zone.”
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports
To further illustrate that cross-section of Mahomes as a player and a person, Kingsbury described his visit to the Chiefs for a day of OTAs in the spring. At one point, as a fly on the wall he was there to watch Mahomes approach a trainer and ask, “Hey, who do we need to get going this week?” Kingsbury saw it, simply, as an example of “a rising-tide-lifts-all-ships type of energy for that organization.”
So in the same way, and for the same reasons, someone like Brady could raise the level of everyone around him, Mahomes can, too.
“You talk to the [Chiefs’] PR department, you talk to the equipment guys, the way they speak of him and the way he treats people in that building, regardless of who you are, the way he knows their names, it’s a cool thing to see,” Kingsbury says. “That’s the Patrick I knew in Lubbock, Texas. To have, after all the success, the accumulation of it, all the things he had, and still be that same guy and improve upon that is really incredible in this day and age.”
Which is to say that as much as Mahomes has improved, there’s still a lot of the 17-year-old Kingsbury saw go for seven touchdowns on a Friday night in East Texas, the one that left him with the stunned belief that he’d never seen anything quite like the kid before.
Evidently, there are a lot of people now who feel the same way Kingsbury did then.
And that’s reflected vividly in the results of our poll.
Those results, soup to nuts, are listed below.
And here are the previous versions I’ve written for Sports Illustrated: 2018, (I didn’t do one in ’19), ’20, ’21 and ’22.
1. Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs
• 391 points
• 71 first-place votes
• Appeared on 80 ballots
• Last year: 1st place
Again, this is Mahomes’s fourth straight year winning the award, and believe it or not, the 87% of first-place votes he got wasn’t even his high—he landed 49 out of 53 of them (92%) three years ago. Now, I’m not saying Mahomes is the greatest ever or anything like that, because it’s way too early to make any such declarations. Tom Brady set the bar really high, and Mahomes himself would tell you he has a long way to go to clear it. But even with the very best quarterbacks, I can’t ever remember there being this level of consensus on who No. 1 is and will be at the end of the year. It’s pretty staggering.
2. Joe Burrow, Bengals
• 274 points
• 5 first-place votes
• Appeared on 78 ballots
• Last year: 5th place
I was, in all honesty, a little surprised that Burrow came in fifth last year after making it to the Super Bowl—he was actually left off 25 ballots altogether. So this feels like a correction. Not only was Burrow the runner-up, he was a strong one, finishing about as close to first as he was to third, with six first-place votes and 41 second-place votes. He appeared on all but two ballots, making him a near-unanimous top-five guy, which is a good sign for how sustainable those across the league see his success being.
3. Josh Allen, Bills
• 165 points
• 2 first-place votes
• Appeared on 62 ballots
• Last year: 2nd place
Allen fatigue? Maybe. The face of the Bills franchise went from 24 first-place votes to just two this year, and was out of the top five for 18 voters after appearing on all but four ballots in 2022. That said, it’s easy to see where the bounceback could come this year—it’ll be his second year under coordinator Ken Dorsey, his elbow is back healthy, and, presumably, his team won’t have to navigate the tumult (the twin snowstorms that displaced them, the Damar Hamlin situation, the Tops supermarket shooting) that made Buffalo an emotionally drained group by the end of last year.
Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports
4. Justin Herbert, Chargers
• 103 points
• 1 first-place vote
• Appeared on 52 ballots
• Last year: 4th place
My sense has been for a long time that Herbert is held in higher regard among NFL folks than he is by the general public (sort of like Matthew Stafford used to be), and the voting of the last two years serves as a good indicator of it. The metrics in his voting were off a tick from last year (fewer points, fewer first-place votes, a couple more ballots omitting him), but it’s pretty close—and a lot of coaches and scouts are expecting a jump with the arrival of Kellen Moore from Dallas and a healthier offensive line.
5. Aaron Rodgers, Jets
• 93.5 points
• 1 first-place vote
• Appeared on 42 ballots
• Last year: 3rd place
Rodgers won this poll in 2015 and ’18, and he’s been in the top five every year I’ve done it. He finished second in ’21 and third in ’22. Last year, he had more than double the points he did this year, and landed 23 first-place votes. So, yeah, this is a bit of a dip, and probably for two reasons—some guesswork in how he’ll look with a new team, and the up-and-down year he had in his final season as a Packer. That said, if the summer was any indication, he’s in great shape and as locked in as he’s been in a while, and the skill guys around him are really good. Now, he just needs the line in front of him to be, too.
6. Jalen Hurts, Eagles
• 90 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 39 ballots
• Last year: unranked
It’s pretty remarkable that Philadelphia threw its hat in the ring for Russell Wilson in early 2022. At that point, there was still plenty of doubt about Hurts league-wide—he didn’t get a single vote in last year’s poll. Fast-forward a year, and he’s four spots higher than Wilson was in 2022 and has improved by just about every measure in each of his three years as a pro. Philly’s confidence in him has certainly grown too, as evidenced by the record-breaking deal he landed in the spring. With his name on nearly half of the 78 ballots I collected, he’s flipped a lot of nonbelievers.
7. Lamar Jackson, Ravens
• 39 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 17 ballots
• Last year: 8th place
Jackson’s in the same range he was the past two years (seventh in ’21, eighth in ’23), but his numbers jumped this year—he more than doubled his point total, and appeared on more than twice as many ballots as a year ago (with 76 collected last season). The truth is, the Ravens star has always dealt with a level of doubt, and this year’s going to be an interesting one for him to try to dispel some of that, with Todd Monken rebuilding the Ravens’ passing game, Rashod Bateman back healthy, and Zay Flowers and Odell Beckham Jr. giving Jackon a receiver group with a higher ceiling than he’s ever had before.
Mark J. Rebilas/USA Today Sports
8. Trevor Lawrence, Jaguars
• 27.5 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 18 ballots
• Last year: tied for 12th place
I thought some people would project a Lawrence bump a year ago. That didn’t happen in the poll—but the bump came, and so Lawrence rounds out a pretty clear-cut top eight. He is younger than everyone above him by over a year (Hurts is 14 months older than Lawrence), and Brock Purdy is the only player on the list younger than him. The pairing with Doug Pederson is humming after the prodigious quarterback’s rocky (to say the least) rookie year, and the Jaguars added Calvin Ridley to an already very solid arsenal. It’d be a pretty big surprise if Lawrence didn’t keep ascending.
9. Matthew Stafford, Rams
• 5 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 4 ballots
• Last year: 7th place
Stafford slipped a little from 2021 to ’22 based on concerns over his elbow, and this year he dropped another two spots after head and back injuries cost him eight games last season. He told me during camp this is as good as he’s felt in years, with his elbow ready to roll and his body healed up, but I think this year’s drop is as much about the Rams’ calculated roster reset (they’re carrying $75 million in dead money) as anything. So while belief in Stafford is still there, and especially inside that building, where the staff believes scheme adjustments will highlight his strengths even better, doubt in what’s around him most certainly exists.
T-10. Kirk Cousins, Vikings
• 3 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 2 ballots
• Last year: unranked
Just as Stafford’s drop is a bit of a reference to what’s around him, my feeling is Cousins’s presence—he last appeared on the list in 2018—is a result of how things have stabilized around him. Sure, Adam Thielen and Dalvin Cook are gone, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. But Cousins has the same offensive coordinator and play-caller for the first time since his first two years as a starter (’15 and ’16, with Sean McVay in Washington); the best receiver in football (Justin Jefferson); an offensive line returning completely intact; a top tight end who had to jump on a moving train last year after a midseason trade (T.J. Hockenson); a reliable, chain-moving slot receiver (K.J. Osborn); and a first-round addition (Jordan Addison) in the fold. So even while the Vikings did some cap cleaning of their own, it’s little wonder why some in the organization expect a career year from Cousins in the final year of his contract.
T-10. Dak Prescott, Cowboys
• 3 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 3 ballots
• Last year: unranked
“I just have a feeling on this one,” says one GM, referencing the increased influence Mike McCarthy will have over the Cowboys’ offense in 2022 and what it could mean for Dallas’s 30-year-old field general. Prescott never ranked highly on this list—he was ninth in both ’20 and ’21 before falling off last year—and the GM’s take represents a bit of a split on predicting the way a swing year for America’s Team and its quarterback will go. Will Prescott benefit from a more hands-on McCarthy? Or will he miss Kellen Moore? Will Brian Schottenheimer find a way to get a little more out of Prescott, like he once did with Russell Wilson in Seattle? Or will the run game’s transition without Zeke Elliott change the dynamic on Dak? There still is, as there always has been, a good base of talent around Prescott. And now maybe more questions than there have been since he became the starter as a rookie in ’16.
12. Derek Carr, Saints
• 2 points
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 2 ballots
• Last year: 9th place
A lot of people bet on the Josh McDaniels–Derek Carr marriage a year ago, and that didn’t work out. But the quarterback did enough there—and people think enough of what he’s walking into in New Orleans—that his name did come up a bunch, with two guys giving him fifth-place votes. Carr’s still plenty talented, has a coach he’s familiar with in Dennis Allen and will have Michael Thomas, Chris Olave, Alvin Kamara and the returning Jimmy Graham to throw to. Add in a division in transition, and you could see a nice resurgence from the Raider castoff at age 32.
Michael Longo/USA Today Network
T-13. Kenny Pickett, Steelers
• 1 point
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 1 ballot
• Last year: unranked
There are a lot of whispers around the league about how good Pickett’s tape was in the preseason and how the Steelers’ offense has a shot to take a leap with so many good, young pieces on hand (Diontae Johnson, George Pickens, Pat Freiermuth, Najee Harris). The fact that one of our voters believes he’ll finish the year among the league’s five best quarterbacks—even if it was “just” fifth—is proof of it, especially with all the doubt there was over whether Pickett was worth a first-round pick only 18 months ago.
T-13. Brock Purdy, 49ers
• 1 point
• 0 first-place votes
• Appeared on 1 ballot
• Last year: unranked
Chalk this up as a vote of confidence in Kyle Shanahan as a coach and the roster he and John Lynch have built coalescing to create an optimal environment for a young quarterback to grow in. But it’s not just that—it’s also a belief in Purdy himself in certain corners of the league. When I wrote a story on Purdy last month, one motivator to pursue was hearing from coaches that they could tell how much Shanahan loves Purdy simply in how he’s called games for him, something that Shanahan himself confirmed to me when I brought it to him. So, yeah, maybe it’s unlikely he’ll finish the season among the top five, or even 10, quarterbacks in football. But it’s not a shot in the dark because, as the voter who cast the ballot for Purdy said, after a strong rookie year, the quarterback returns with “another year in a really good system that he seemed to have an excellent grasp of.”
