How the Chiefs recognized Patrick Mahomes’ ‘magical ability’ before anyone else

In 2015, on the heels of a four-win season, the University of Colorado hired a new co-offensive coordinator. It was a seemingly nondescript move — until it preceded one of the best turnarounds in school history.

Darrin Chiaverini arrived from Texas Tech, coming off a pretty good offensive season with a pretty good then-sophomore quarterback whose potential and national recognition stretched in confounding contrast.

The quarterback was about to draw some attention in Boulder, Colorado, though, even if he didn’t know it. Even if he still doesn’t know this story.

Chiaverini had clipped together Texas Tech plays for his introductory meeting with his new assistant coaches, among them Joe Bleymaier, who months later would land his first NFL gig in Kansas City.

Bleymaier, now the Chiefs’ passing game coordinator, sat among coaches present to learn the offense. But his eyes quickly fixated elsewhere.

“The quarterback,” he said, “was screaming off the film.”

“Who is this guy?”

Chiaverini had explained the offense so simply that day, so matter-of-factly, that the other co-offensive coordinator in the room, Brian Lindgren, a carryover from Colorado, couldn’t help but interject.

“This is great and all, but our guy can’t do that. We don’t have anybody who can do that,” Lindgren, now the offensive coordinator at Michigan State, said of the quarterback play, as Bleymaier recalled during an interview at last season’s Super Bowl. “That’s not a normal answer for the quarterback to just do that.”

“No, trust me,” Chiaverini replied. “We run this all the time.”

The quarterback on that film had thrown no-look passes in practice clips, and if you haven’t caught up by now, yes, it’s a young Patrick Mahomes. He’d routinely used sidearm baseball throws to bypass charging defensive ends. There were plays that intentionally featured rollouts to the left, allowing the quarterback to throw back right with such ease.

They had gathered that morning to dissect a brand-new offense, but a different conversation left that room.

I wonder if anyone is in on this kid.

The Chiefs Laboratory

The back layer inside the Chiefs’ practice facility is reserved for the team’s personnel department. At the heart of it once resided a meeting room filled with cubicles, but absent windows.

It’s a dungeon back there, the kind of room in which you walk out and your eyes feel sensitive to light. But the front office offered a more tolerable nickname for it: The Laboratory.

There, inside The Laboratory, is where, yes, someone was in on this kid.

Because of that kid, because of Mahomes, the Chiefs will kick off the NFL season Thursday by unveiling their third Super Bowl banner in the past five years. They will then turn their attention to a pursuit of history, attempting to become the league’s first team to win three straight Super Bowls.

That journey will accelerate in prime-time in front of a national TV audience.

Behind the scenes, however, inside that dungeon without even the possibility of an outside audience, it started long, long before.

Brett Veach, now the Chiefs’ general manager, was introduced to Patrick Mahomes through a video screen, and their most important early meeting came by accident. Veach began one day scouting a Texas Tech offensive lineman but concluded it by telling KC head coach Andy Reid he’d found the Chiefs’ next franchise quarterback.

If you knew Veach, you knew he was serious. He is persistent and boisterous about that kind of thing, but with Mahomes, he exaggerated his persistence to the point that Reid eventually felt it necessary to tell him enough already. They’ve mentioned that before. The gist of it: Mahomes became a religion in a tight circle inside those walls, and nobody was more devout than Veach.

That anecdote, though, leaves a much more intriguing question, given the GM’s infatuation ran opposite of the take held by so many of his peers:

Why?

Why were the Chiefs so over-the-top enamored of Mahomes that they were willing to sacrifice significant assets to move into the top 10 of the NFL Draft to acquire him? All while nine teams (not just the Bears) passed on him, before a 10th graciously moved out of that spot.

You know, 26 teams had better resources to make that pick that night. This isn’t Caleb Williams falling into the Bears’ lap.

There is much known about the Chiefs’ execution on draft day — none better told than the late, great Terez Paylor, who described it in great detail — but it’s a misconception to think the Chiefs stole Mahomes from the rest of the league.

The rest of the league, the league growing tired of watching the Chiefs’ success, willfully handed him over. They prioritized other plans.

The real work — the work that separated the Chiefs — preceded draft night.

What did the Chiefs see that others missed?

A reminder: Veach was the boldest and the earliest, but he wasn’t even the Chiefs’ general manager when he locked in on Mahomes. He was co-player of personnel director for then-general manager John Dorsey, a title he shared with Mike Borgonzi, who now serves as Veach’s assistant GM.

Veach and Borgonzi spent most of their time scouting players in neighboring offices, but that summer, Borgonzi began to hear a frequent phrase shouted into the hallway.

Borgo! Come look at this throw!

Yes, the arm talent popped first. Matt Nagy, the Chiefs offensive coordinator, referred to it in meetings as “singular arm talent,” others recalled. Maybe the Chiefs thought more of the arm, but surely the other 31 teams could see that.

They just fixated on something else too.

The red flags.

To Kansas City, Mahomes might be perfect. But to scouts in 2016 and 2017, he had blemishes — the kind of blemishes that produce warning signs about whether he can translate to the NFL. Some of it was out of his control. The conference. The school. They’d both produced college stars and NFL duds.

It was more than that, though. At the NFL Combine this year, a longtime scout who now works for an AFC South team said this:

“I could tell you there was a lot to like about him, because there was, but there were also a lot of concerns about his style of play that were hard to ignore at that time — what was what, a decade ago? At a time when you looked across the NFL and the success of quarterbacks, the conventional wisdom was you had to play (in) the pocket. And the truth is he had lousy footwork; he took too many chances; and he was reckless with the football.”

Another scout for the same team, who graded him as a late first-rounder, said, “Aside from the arm movement, footwork is among my primary evaluations. That was out of whack — not enough that he’s off your board or anything, but for a top-10 pick, we felt he had a lot to learn.”

The Chiefs saw those imperfections too. They were real. Heck, they still talk about improving his footwork.

Borgonzi, first hired by the Chiefs in 2009 to administer college scouting, preserves his scouting reports dating back more than a decade. The first time he scouted Mahomes, he took notes on a half-dozen games.

There’s a funny line in the report, referring to an interception Mahomes threw late in a game:

“What was he thinking here?”

But it’s overwhelmed by the rest of his notes, particularly a couple that he literally highlighted in yellow that day:

Rare throw.

Rare throw.

And the most foretelling, couldn’t-script-it-any-better one of all: Magic ability.

Magic.

Ability.

That’s what the Chiefs saw first. That’s what they saw foremost.

“The biggest thing for me when we first started watching him were his instincts,” Borgonzi said. “He had rare arm talent, but he just felt things coming. If you’re watching a guy and he makes one throw that’s incredible, you pay attention. But the more you watched him, you could see it was a feel.

“When you’re trying to figure out a guy’s instincts, I don’t care what position it is, it takes multiple games (to scout) and get a feel for it. His instincts, you couldn’t teach.”

So, what was it like in that room?

The Chiefs were awed by the awesome. They allowed themselves to be awed by the awesome and find solutions for their concerns. When the proceed-with-caution signs popped on Mahomes’ tape — the conference, school, Air Raid offense, footwork, careless throws and, heck, the record — they stood out. But the Chiefs used them not as excuses to move on.

The man in charge — the head coach who had once employed Brett Favre — had a different response to those flaws.

“I can fix it,” Reid said.

‘In the gray’

The Chiefs have a phrase for the way Patrick Mahomes plays football, but even if it fits him best, it predates his arrival in Kansas City.

Playing in the gray.

For years, the NFL had searched for the quarterback who best operated when things were black and white. It’s why Mahomes’ feet, not just the history of Big 12 or Texas Tech quarterbacks, dropped him on draft boards.

How did Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees become some of the most successful passers in NFL history? They recognized the black and white, and they dominated in those parameters. If the best passers in the league did it the same way, why not seek that?

Mahomes was different. Every team saw that. One didn’t shy away from it. They were mesmerized, not alarmed, by something they hadn’t seen. Hours, days and months into the film, the Chiefs were willing to reach a different conclusion about why he was different.

“He was a magician in the gray,” said offensive coordinator Nagy.

A theme, though, and this, too, separates how they viewed him:

“I don’t know how much defense he was actually reading — maybe he was — but he just had a feel for where his receivers were going to be,” Borgonzi said. “If you saw enough of it, it wasn’t a mistake.”

Sounds familiar, right?

So will this:

“When the play broke down, you didn’t get nervous,” Veach said, “You got excited.”

“Couldn’t put the remote down,” Nagy said.

Asked if any particular play stood out, Nagy quickly responded, “You want to go up in my office and watch 180 of them?”

The Chiefs have worked with Mahomes on his fundamentals, particularly with the lower half of his body. Every season after a game in which he struggled, Mahomes will almost certainly mention his fundamentals. It’s uncanny. But it’s a fine balance, because they don’t want to lose the gray. Don’t want to lose the magic.

As it made their counterparts nervous, that magic drew the Chiefs in.

Still does.

On a slow day in the offseason, Nagy re-watches some of those 180 plays.

But sometimes there’s a purpose beyond entertainment. To this day, if Mahomes struggles to make a throw or wonders aloud about its difficulty, Nagy will bring him into his office and flip on the computer.

And there he is, No. 5 for Texas Tech.

“Well,” Nagy will say, “you made this throw in college.”

They have the tape memorized. They should. They exhausted it in the winter and spring. Veach typically watches film in bunches — three, four or five games on a single player — but he waited for Mahomes’ clips to arrive like a kid at the mailbox yearning for a birthday gift.

They’d scouted Mahomes in person, too, of course. They’d done a lot of homework before Mahomes finally made his notable visit to Kansas City.

Which, here’s the deal about that pre-draft meeting — the eight-hour sit-down that caused Mahomes to nearly miss his flight home, but also the one in which Nagy (and he says it was with Veach’s support) offered him a peek at the test a day before Andy Reid asked the questions.

Reid was already on board.

After watching Mahomes’ clips, Veach would rewind one last time, pull out his phone and open the camera. He’d point it toward the screen and hit record.

“Coach has to see this,” he’d say.

Reid knew. The coach poking his head into the hallway and giving Veach a thumbs-up was far closer to final confirmation than first impression.

The Chiefs saw the same risks as their counterparts. Maybe their counterparts could squint and see the potential reward, even.

But the full package drove the Chiefs in a distinct direction: It’s worth it.

They attempted to move as far up in the draft as they could, because they couldn’t be completely sure the answer to the question that Joe Bleymaier (who coincidentally would end up coaching Mahomes) had wondered months earlier from afar in Boulder.

Is anyone (else) on this kid?

There’s no sense in re-hashing the details of draft day, because this is about all the Chiefs saw beforehand. But a relevant story: To throw off the reasoning behind their pre-draft phone calls as they furiously tried to move up the board, Veach might have not-so-accidentally let slip why they wanted to trade up.

He didn’t mind letting the world know. He didn’t mind sharing that the Chiefs had a specific priority in that draft.

A linebacker.

Sounds like a plan, right?