The image that danced in the general manager’s head is one you might remember. It happened in the Sunday night window of Week 4 last season on a second-and-goal, with the Chiefs at the Buccaneers’ 2-yard line, the ball on the left hash and 11:35 left in the second quarter. Patrick Mahomes took the snap and rolled right; Tampa Bay DE Pat O’Connor came free to the right side of the Chiefs’ line and shot straight at Mahomes like he came out of a cannon.
Mahomes got depth and ran around O’Connor, diving at him, then sprinted to the right boundary with Tampa All-Pro Devin White closing in on him. The quarterback planted off his lead foot and spun back to the field, sending White into the grass before doubling back to the sideline to avoid Keanu Neal, and, now hard against the sideline, flipped the ball over a crowd of players from both teams and into the waiting hands of Clyde Edwards-Helaire for the score.
It was, undoubtedly, a signature moment in the quarterback’s second MVP season.
It was also where this GM’s mind wandered as he listened to a league official go on and on at last week’s annual meeting, telling the assembled GMs, coaches, execs and owners the Chiefs led the NFL in a certain injury-related category—and trying to correlate it to their championship run. As if that’s why Kansas City hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in mid-February.
“They got f—ing Patrick Mahomes,” the GM thought. “What the hell are we talking about?”
It wasn’t, of course, out of any disrespect to the Chiefs or to an important NFL initiative.
It was, instead, part of a conversation I was having with him about how teams reward their quarterbacks and which ones are worth paying. And those moments, both the one in Florida in October and this one in Arizona last week, illustrate where we were going with all this—in both whom you reward and how laughable overcomplicating any of it is.
“Come on, dude,” he says, laughing. “It’s Patrick Mahomes. So, yeah, sure, when you got that guy. And I think Joe Burrow is that guy, too. I think [Justin] Herbert is that guy. Josh Allen, when you have that player, yes. He’s been in your building, you drafted him and you developed him, you know exactly what he is, yes. Bet the farm. Give him everything.”
But if you don’t?
That’s what we’re going to explore this week, diving into how the quarterback market has materially changed over the last couple of months, with the league’s highest-end players at the position subtly separating from the pack and the future of the middle-class signal-caller shifting in a pretty significant way.
As our GM says, if you’ve got Mahomes, you can more or less hand him a blank check. If you don’t, how you fill that position is far more complicated.
