KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After throwing three interceptions in a 34-28 win at Denver last month, Patrick Mahomes sighed as he greeted the media after the game and delved right into what he called “three bad decisions” … and the common impetus behind them.
He was “trying to force it when it’s not there,” he would say, and was “just being a little too loose with the football.”
All because, even in his sixth NFL season, he’s still seeking to discern that elusive, as he put it, “fine line (between) when I’m going that type of stuff and it’s good for us and when I do stuff and it’s bad for us.”
In a superficial sense, it might seem strange to hear Mahomes repeating something he’s been saying virtually his entire career.
As if he’s stuck trying to decipher the same issues or reconcile the same mundane data.
Instead, it speaks to something else entirely for an ever-evolving force blessed with what a forever family friend likes to call a “geo-spatial magic box” of a mind.
Along with the abiding mentality of always pushing the envelope — “to surpass normal limits or attempt something viewed as radical or risky,” as Merriam-Webster.com puts it.
That attitude, and his remarkable ability to execute in the margins and crannies where few dare to tread, is a vital part of why Mahomes is still thriving against the typically brilliant minds engineering NFL defenses. Even working with an almost entirely new receiving cast this season.
In fact, this season is likely to be punctuated with his second MVP coronation.
So it’s not that he’s still sorting out some fixed line as the Chiefs (14-3) prepared to begin the postseason on Saturday playing host to the Jacksonville Jaguars (10-8) as they strive to reach their fifth straight AFC Championship Game.
It’s that Mahomes is continuously reassessing and re-calibrating what that line is through collaboration with coach Andy Reid, the harmonious composer to Mahomes’ performer, and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy and quarterbacks coach Matt Nagy.
Because the line is in flux (if not even blurry, as The Kansas City Star’s Jesse Newell wrote earlier this season) almost by design.
“I think with the great quarterbacks, the ones that do it consistently over time, that bar is always changing,” Nagy said when I asked him about that a few weeks ago. “It’s always moving. It is fluid.”
When we took up the topic again on Wednesday, Nagy reiterated that pushing the envelope “never ends with him. His mindset is that way.”
And while he believes Mahomes has improved at distinguishing between forcing the issue and seizing what’s there (with the help of that being a daily point of discussion), he also doesn’t want to sterilize Mahomes’ penchant for the spectacular.
“Always: Don’t ever lose that,” Nagy said. “I’ve heard this in the past and I think this kind of relates to it: … There’s reckless and there’s ruthless. …
“We don’t want reckless. But ruthless is a good word at being able to rip your heart out and go downfield.”
Yes, Mahomes is human and sometimes overextends.
Or as a reader emailed last year, sometimes he could be seen as Patrick “Icarus” Mahomes, a reference to the character in Greek mythology whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
But despite what might have been perceived about Mahomes coming out of Texas Tech, and thankfully for the Chiefs left him still available to trade up for the 10th overall pick in the 2017 NFL draft, Mahomes seldom is reckless.
Not through his career, with 192 touchdown passes (to 49 interceptions) for 24,241 yards. And certainly not this season, with 41 TD passes and 12 interceptions for 5,250 yards through a career-best 67.1 completion percentage (435 of 648).
That aforementioned Denver game marked just the third time in his career Mahomes threw three interceptions. And even as he stood before reporters afterward, he was already processing what had gone awry on each and resetting with the information.
Never mind that he threw for 352 yards that day, including a no-look flick to Jerick McKinnon for a 56-yard touchdown on the way to a 27-0 lead.
“Maybe one other person that can do that, maybe nobody,” Nagy said last month. “When you have that happen, you can only sit back and chuckle and just say, ‘Well, that was a pretty good play, and we just became really good coaches on that play.’ ”
More seriously, he added, “You don’t really coach that.”
But they do coach Mahomes to keep exploiting his greatest gifts: from arm strength to an uncanny sense of where he is and connectivity with his target audience — particularly that ESP he enjoys with Travis Kelce.
There are many different ways to try to describe Mahomes’ knack for learning from his experiences and enjoying what seems very much like “total consciousness,” to borrow from the tall tale of Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler with the Dalai Lama in “Caddyshack.”
But the dynamic one that most comes to mind is the description of Parker, who also was one of Mahomes’ first coaches. When I visited Mahomes’ hometown of Whitehouse, Texas, in 2019, Parker brought up that notion of the “geospatial magic box” that he believes enables Mahomes to absorb and measure everything around him in real time.
All at once, he believes, Mahomes nearly always can input terrain, situation, past mistakes, moving targets, pocket security and his own trajectory and react with a corresponding solution. Or even dictate new parameters.
Between that awareness and what agent Leigh Steinberg considers an eidetic (aka, photographic) memory, Mahomes almost never is fazed by what he encounters.
Or as Richard Keefe, the former director of sports psychology at Duke University, told me for a piece I wrote on Mahomes a few years ago: “You know his psychology has to be, ‘I can do this. Where is it? Where’s the lock that fits this key? Because I have a key.’ ”
So the Chiefs are “always in the lab” with Mahomes, as receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster put it, and always have to be alert to what he might do next … including taking off and running.
“Guys can’t drop out of coverage or leave their man to stop the quarterback because he’s still looking downfield … even when he’s not,” Smith-Schuster said.
Playing with Mahomes, Smith-Schuster added, reminded him of playing “Madden” with Michael Vick — who could “just run all over the field and then launch it 80 yards down the field.”
“It’s kind of like that, but for me it’s ‘IRL,’ ” he said. “In real life.”
Just like each experience with each is part of the ongoing progression of Mahomes toward divining the ever-changing line.
“I want to always have that aggressiveness to me. I think that’s what’s got me here,” Mahomes said last month. “That’s who I am.”
But he’s also the guy who knows that can be all the more effective the more he’s able to also accept what’s underneath and continue learning what he can and can’t control.
Always, though, with breaking barriers as his guiding light.
“I always want to be just pushing it to where it’s just right at the edge …” he said. “It gives guys chances to make plays, and I think we’re coached that way. Coach Reid wants us to go out there and push it. Push it to the right limit, and then just don’t go past it.”
Easier said than done for most. Occasionally, even for him.
But that mentality, and the capacity to actualize it and keep refining it, is vital to what the Chiefs have been doing … and their chances of continuing on this arc.
