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Originally Posted by WSJ
Patrick Mahomes Is Conquering the NFL
The Kansas City Chiefs’ risky decision is proving brilliant as their young quarterback is emerging as the NFL’s newest star.
The Chiefs began this season with the distinct possibility that they would look like complete dunces. During the past off-season they traded away Alex Smith, who had one of the best seasons in the league last year, and turned over the quarterback reins to Patrick Mahomes.
The problem with that nobody knew if Mahomes would be better than Smith or even good at all. Mahomes could flop. And if Mahomes flopped, the Chiefs’ decision to trade away their quarterback who was definitely good in order to go with a quarterback who might be good would be quite the head scratcher.
Two weeks into this season, it’s no longer reasonable to question if Mahomes is good, and it’s far more reasonable to ponder if Mahomes is great. That much was clear after his second consecutive monster game. He threw for six touchdowns in a 42-37 win against the Steelers—giving him 10 through the season’s first two weeks.
Mahomes, 22 years old, is now the youngest player in the Super Bowl era with a six-touchdown passing game. His 10 throwing scores are a record for the first two weeks of the season. But his eye-popping statistics, somehow, aren’t even the most jarring aspect of what he has done so far. That’s because somehow what he has done is less notable than how he has done it.
Mahomes has dazzled with heaves uncommon in the modern NFL, which has increasingly shifted toward favoring high-probability short passes over riskier and longer ones. Mahomes has taken that trend and blasted it to smithereens with the bazooka attached to the right side of his torso.
His first career touchdown pass, against the Chargers, went for 58 yards to Tyreek Hill. Another, later in that game, went for 36. That continued this week against Pittsburgh. Four of his six touchdown passes went for 15 yards or longer, capped off by a 29-yard laser to Hill. In between those scores, he completed passes to Sammy Watkins for 40 yards, Hill for 36 yards and Travis Kelce for 31. Altogether, in two weeks, he has put together the type of highlight reel some teams can’t splice together over the course of an entire season.
There were reasons to believe this was entirely possible but there were also reasons to be plenty skeptical. The Chiefs have clearly believed in Mahomes for a while. They traded up to take him with the No. 10 overall pick in the 2017 draft, even though Smith was entrenched as the team’s starter. Mahomes spent most of the season on the bench, though he started one game, a Chiefs win, where he threw for 284 yards, one interception—and no touchdowns.
As a prospect, Mahomes was alluring. He was also polarizing. His arm strength was obvious and so was his production. During his junior season at Texas Tech, he completed 65.7% of his passes for 5,052 yards and 41 touchdowns. He ran for 12 more touchdowns, too.
If those numbers seem completely absurd, that’s because they’re completely absurd. And there was a natural question: Was his production the result of his talent or a Texas Tech offensive system that regularly produces outsize passing numbers? In spite of his production that year, Texas Tech went just 5-7.
Then the decision to put the Chiefs’ fate in his hands was made even weightier by Smith’s production last season. Smith had a career year, leading the NFL in passer rating despite some second-half struggles. Instead of Smith, though, they decided to go with a player who could realistically fizzle for a reason that has nothing to do with Mahomes specifically and everything to do with the position he plays. Quarterbacks taken high in the draft fizzle regularly.
Any questions that this would happen dissipated after the first game. Then after this second one, something else happened. After playing against two veteran quarterbacks, Philip Rivers and Ben Roethlisberger, who have been among the best in the game since Mahomes was in elementary school, it became clear that the player on the other side of the field is taking up that mantle faster than anybody could have expected.
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