The Offseason Education of Patrick Mahomes

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Long article so I'll just post part of it, but a good read about Mahomes and Veach and how they dealt with losing the Super Bowl.

https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2021/8...ovement-chiefs

The Offseason Education of Patrick Mahomes

By Kevin Clark Aug 11, 2021, 6:10am EDT


The best quarterback in football watched the worst game of his career twice.

He was looking for something to learn from, because that’s sorta just what he does, and he found it. “Sometimes,” Patrick Mahomes told me, “when I get hit early, I don’t trust staying in the pocket and going through my reads.”

“I kind of get back to that backyard-style football a little bit too much. And you could definitely see that in the Super Bowl. I mean, there were times that pockets were clean and I was still scrambling,” Mahomes continued.

It’s been six months since the Super Bowl, a 31-9 Buccaneers win, and Mahomes and I are standing on the side of a practice field on a ludicrously hot Missouri afternoon to talk about what he’s gleaned since that night. The short answer is a lot. I came to St. Joseph, Missouri, to find out what comes next for the Chiefs. The answer is everything.

No serious person thinks the Chiefs lost the Super Bowl because of Mahomes. But that is almost the point: He’s learning from it anyway. He is an MVP, a three-time Pro Bowl selection, and a Super Bowl champion whose team has made two Super Bowls and an AFC title game in his three seasons as a starter. He has united with coach Andy Reid to build one of the most impressive and sustainable offenses in league history. Part of what was so startling about the final game of the season was that in three years, Mahomes had developed a style of play that was almost always perfect. He was John Wick with a pencil or Kevin Durant with a burner Twitter account. All he needed for his entire career was a football and he could make magic happen. Statistically, the Super Bowl was the worst game of his career; it was the first game in his NFL life he lost by more than one score. But the story of the game was the Bucs’ fast defense speeding past a banged-up, makeshift Chiefs offensive line. The enduring image of February’s loss was Mahomes parallel to the ground, throwing a pretty good pass after getting tripped up in the backfield. In short, he wasn’t himself because he didn’t have the time to be. Mahomes was pressured 29 times—a Super Bowl record—and ran a total of 497 yards behind the line of scrimmage to avoid the Bucs’ pass rush. Todd Bowles’s defense accomplished that despite blitzing far less than usual, and it worked because the Bucs front was able to put near constant pressure on Mahomes while the defensive backs and linebackers did their jobs behind them.

“I think it’s pretty obvious to say how we needed to get better and the path we needed to take to get better. It was probably pretty clear to most football fans, even if you don’t work for the Chiefs,” general manager Brett Veach told me of the offseason. “You’re literally on the bus on the way back from the Super Bowl thinking ‘How are we going to get this done?’” The path, obviously, was fixing the offensive line. In the Super Bowl, the team was without longtime starters Eric Fisher (tore his Achilles in the AFC title game), Mitchell Schwartz (back injury), and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif (a medical school graduate who opted out of the season and returned to the medical field). Veach, one of the best problem solvers in the sport, solved this one quickly once Fisher and Schwartz were both released. Veach traded for Ravens tackle Orlando Brown, signed Joe Thuney, drafted Creed Humphrey in the second round, and lured Kyle Long out of retirement. Mahomes will be playing behind an entirely different line this year. This is the story of how the 2021 Chiefs have spent the past six months learning the lessons of that night in Tampa.

Those next steps, obviously, extend to the August practice after which I met with Mahomes, and he detailed exactly how he’s building off of what he saw on tape. He continued his thought on playing too much “backyard football” that night. “So,” Mahomes said, “I’ve been going back [working] on that. Making sure that I trust the guys around me and trust the pocket, make the read within the pocket and not try to make the big play happen.”

This tendency to, as Mahomes puts it, stop trusting his reads after hits, is something he’s said he’s always focused on fixing, but he said he noticed it particularly in that February game. Now comes fixing it. “Days like today,” he said, “we have long drive drills. We’re going 15 and 16 plays in a row of stepping up in the pocket and making the right reads and not just relying on scrambling and making all these different throws. That’s just stuff that comes with repetition and a lot of hard work that I’ve tried to put in every single year.”