The teams most interested in him, according to his agent, Leigh Steinberg - the Chiefs, the Steelers, the Giants, the Saints - were already led by entrenched starters at the position. Scouts drooled over Mahomes’ potential, but almost universally agreed that he needed time to sit and sharpen his skills. He was too erratic. Plus, he played in the dreaded collegiate Air Raid offense.
It was an unusual scenario for a prospect destined for the top half of the first round. Even as conventional league wisdom shifted towards starting rookie quarterbacks as early as possible, Mahomes and Steinberg received feedback suggesting the opposite would be true. Mahomes, it seemed, was destined to sit out his rookie season.
“He’s known for sometime in this process that (sitting) was most likely,” Steinberg says.
Since JaMarcus Russell and Brady Quinn combined for just one start between them as rookies in 2007, though, that scenario has been pretty much non-existent. Of the 24 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since, 19 started more than half their games as a rookie. Of the five remaining, only Tennessee’s Jake Locker failed to start a game. Even Tim Tebow, who struggled to throw a spiral, got three starts in his debut season.
For as much lip service as NFL coaches pay to their rookie quarterbacks “earning their spot” or “paying their dues”, nearly all of them over the past decade folded when pressure over their new signal caller set in. That was a decisive shift from the decade before, when a majority of rookie quarterbacks carried clipboards in Year 1.
But this draft - and Mahomes, in particular - may mark another turning point in that trend, a correction back to pre-2007 thinking. The Bears traded up to select Mitchell Trubisky at No. 2 overall, despite free agent signee Mike Glennon’s presence on the depth chart. Eight picks later, as the Chiefs traded up to draft him 10th overall and the likelihood of a redshirt season crystallized, Mahomes accepted the reality he was long anticipating.
In the process, the NFL may, too, have finally opened its eyes to its new normal: That rookie quarterbacks are further away from being NFL-ready than ever before.
“(Mahomes) really thinks this will help him become a better quarterback in the long run,” Steinberg says. “We’ve seen so many examples of players who were rushed into service, and their whole career was foreshortened because the developmental process was distorted.”
When it comes to developing quarterbacks, sweeping conclusions are foolish. Philip Rivers and Aaron Rodgers sat out their rookie seasons. But so did Quinn and Locker. For each sad story of David Carr’s downfall, there is the success of an immediate starter such as Andrew Luck. Mahomes or Trubisky - or even Jared Goff - could still fall on either side of that line.
But if this latest draft tells us anything, it’s that teams may finally be planning ahead, when it comes to the quarterback position. At the very least, it’s an interesting subtext to this class of quarterbacks, many of whom could end up in a better developmental situation than any of their predecessors over the past decade.
“Right now, Patrick’s absolutely not ready to play,” Reid admitted after the draft. “He’s got some work to do. But he’s coming into a great room, and he gets an opportunity to learn from Alex Smith, which will be a phenomenal experience for him to learn the offense. And so we have to be patient with him. He’s definitely not a finished product right now, but he has a tremendous upside.
It’s fair to wonder if Jared Goff might have benefited from such a blunt approach to his development. As a rookie, Goff obviously lagged behind Case Keenum early. By midseason, he was still far from ready for primetime. And while the public pressure to play him was complicated - the Rams being a bad team in a new market with a coaching staff on the hotseat - there’s an argument to be made that a redshirt year might have put Goff further ahead of the curve than seven games of Fisherball.
Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but the real shift here isn’t the quarterback-desperate teams at the top of the draft. It’s the forward-thinking urgency of teams like the Chiefs, Saints, Steelers, Giants, Cardinals, and Chargers to consider investing a first-round pick in a quarterback years before their current starter rides off into the sunset. There was no real way to avoid playing Goff last season, but for Mahomes, at least - and perhaps Trubisky - it’s possible to get through this season without playing a down.
As college quarterbacks read fewer defenses and call fewer plays from a huddle, the transition to the NFL is becoming more and more difficult at the position. Coaches across the league are already whining about this status quo, en masse.
Which makes this draft an interesting test case. A quarterback-heavy class looms in 2018, with a far better crop of top-flight talent at the position. And as the Chargers consider a succession plan for Philip Rivers, following the Chiefs lead and using a top pick on a talented quarterback to wait in the wings - say, Louisville Heisman winner Lamar Jackson - may be the best strategy to ensure the future of the franchise.
“If three or four of these quarterbacks sit for a year or two and develop into quality starting quarterbacks,” Steinberg says, “I wonder if we could be seeing the start of a new trend.”
Maybe. Or maybe Smith will fall apart midseason, and the Chiefs will change their tune on Mahomes, speeding up his timeline, just like the Rams and pretty much every team who drafted a quarterback over the past decade has done when the L’s start to pile up.
We won’t know for another few seasons if that wait-and-see strategy will actually pay off. But as college quarterbacks are less prepared and the need for NFL signal callers grows increasingly more desperate, patience certainly seems like a virtue worth exploring.
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