Stunning behind-the-back pass reiterates creative genius of Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes

Some will dismiss it as a gimmick or showmanship. And, look, the fact that it was concocted in a mere preseason game can’t be overstated. Plus, well, they do it all the time in basketball, Chiefs coach Andy Reid said.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” he added.

But when Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes completed a behind-the-back pass to — who else? — Travis Kelce against Detroit on Saturday afternoon at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, it didn’t just go viral with some 2.5 million views by halftime.

It also reiterated how Mahomes’ creative imagination continues to animate his insatiable competitiveness. Even as he enters his seventh NFL season.

In this case, by doing something even he’d been reluctant to try despite his “push the envelope” default mentality.

Only days before the 24-23 loss to the Lions, Mahomes completed another behind-the-back pass in practice and noted that Reid then reminded him, “I’ve been telling you to do that for a while.”

Mahomes on Thursday added, “I’m telling you, he’s all for it. It’s me (who is) the one that’s hesitant to do it in a game.”

Not as of Saturday, though, when he uncorked it even when things weren’t exactly aligned perfectly.

More precisely, he did it spontaneously on what had the makings of a broken run-pass option play.

Kelce was supposed to be running a flat route, Mahomes said. But he was so off track that Mahomes figured he could be heard yelling at Kelce, as he said during the KSHB 41 game broadcast.

So Mahomes “got stuck with the football in my hand,” as he put it, and found himself thinking “Gosh darnit, Travis.”

For his part, Kelce on the broadcast laughed and said not to let Mahomes trick anyone into thinking Kelce had done anything wrong. Invoking Mahomes’ gravelly, Kermit-like voice, he said Mahomes had “kind of mumbled out the play,” so he’d been left to “decipher” it.

As he was “trying to help my guy out” and adjust, Mahomes was “already in mid-form, like a photo on a sports card, throwing the ball to me. So it was just, I guess, right place at the right time.”

More so than he realized.

Because this spellbinding play was delivered not just “out of spite,” as Mahomes playfully put it about his exasperation with Kelce, but also via what Mahomes called the exact right conditions:

Improv, which made for a play believed never to have been made in an NFL regular-season game.

“I always told you, it has to happen naturally,” Mahomes said after the game. “I can’t, like, force it.”

Or as he put it during the broadcast, it’s got to be “kind of in the groove of things.”

One of Mahomes’ distinguishing knacks, naturally, is making about any circumstance “the groove of things” for him.

In this case, it was good for 8 yards on a third-and-3 … and a rare whoa moment in a meaningless preseason game.

“If Pat starts throwing behind the back passes every time Travis runs the wrong route,” Kelce’s brother Jason posted on X, “this may be the most exciting year of football to date.”

Most to the immediate point, it was a vivid reminder of the yet-unfurling synergy between Mahomes and Reid, not to mention Kelce, in a process that Mahomes calls “so much freedom within structure.”

And it was fresh affirmation of Mahomes’ seemingly infinite capacity to astonish even after six full seasons as QB1 that have produced four Super Bowl appearances and three championships; Mahomes has been decorated with three Super Bowl MVP awards and two NFL MVP distinctions.

Even in the context of a game that doesn’t count, it reiterates the ever-shifting frontier of possibilities for the quarterback we’ve already seen routinely complete sidearm throws through a thimble and a left-handed pass among countless jaw-dropping career highlights.

Including the no-look passes that make it so we can’t look away.

Lest you forgot, especially after a season in which his numbers were diminished because of a problematic receiving corps, his arsenal and range always has been informed by his mesmerizing arm, beautiful mind, spatial awareness and fluid baseball and basketball mechanics.

Which all funnels into his own unique flourishes.

That’s why the Harlem Globetrotters made a video tribute to him three years ago, expressed through the voices of three players:

“The Harlem Globetrotters have been the innovators of basketball for 94 years … But there’s a guy in the NFL who reminds us of us. … Patrick Mahomes has us looking at football in a whole new way.”

And it’s why Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick long has believed he sees the spirit of the Negro Leagues in Mahomes — whose father, Pat, idolized Satchel Paige to the point of trying to imitate his deliveries and sharing tales of him with young Patrick.

Mahomes embraced that suggestion in the days before leading the Chiefs over the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII:

“Yeah, I think it’s just you see the creativity that they had as they obviously played at such a high level,” he said. “But they enjoyed what they did, and I think that’s what you see with me on the football field.”

That we do, punctuated anew but hardly defined by what we saw Saturday — when perhaps Mahomes’ most significant play was a 39-yard pass to rookie Xavier Worthy emblematic of a dimension the Chiefs hope to restore in the offense this season.

As for the behind-the-back pass, Reid resisted my perhaps overly enthusiastic suggestion that this opened up a new frontier for Mahomes.

“Sure,” he said, with what might be called a sarcastic grin.

For that matter, Mahomes downplayed any idea that this now will be some sort of routine part of his game.

“It’s not something that I’m going to try to major in,” he said.

Accordingly, it remains to be seen whether Mahomes will become what would almost certainly be the first to achieve that in a regular-season game.

The most readily found semi-precedent online was that of then-Philadelphia quarterback Sonny Jurgensen completing one in a 1961 preseason game against the College All-Stars.

And, according to a 2012 story in The New York Times, a 1947 book about the Chicago Bears crediting John Doehring with attempting one in a 1934 game lacks credibility because it wasn’t mentioned in the game story written by the Chicago Tribune’s George Strickler, who likely wouldn’t have overlooked that as one who went on to be inducted in the writers’ wing of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

So, we’ll see.

But the point here is less about that specific feat than what the gesture Saturday restates about Mahomes:

Nothing is ever static in his game, making anticipation of what he might do next or again as exhilarating as ever … only more so as he continues to bend traditional boundaries.