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Andy Reid coached for the Mike Holmgren Packers, and led his own powerhouse teams, and won for four years in Kansas City before Patrick Mahomes was even on the roster. He’s in his 31st season in the NFL, and that followed a good run as a college assistant.
Bottom line, the 64-year-old Chiefs boss has been around a lot of good players.
How Reid explains where Mahomes is as a player, at 27 years old, carries weight. So his answer—when I asked him whether the quarterback may already be as good a player as he’s ever coached—is worth your attention.
“Yeah, I mean, listen, I would be saying …” started Reid, as he sat on the Kansas City team plane, waiting for takeoff in Las Vegas. “I coached [Brett] Favre. I coached him, I coached Michael Vick, I coached Donovan McNabb. And this guy is right up there, and they all have their strengths and their weaknesses, but he’s a lot of fun to coach. He’s as good as it gets.”
How about an appreciation for Mahomes—before anyone starts taking him for granted?
The 2017 first-round pick is in his fifth year as a starter and is now one win away from his fifth AFC championship game. It’d also be his fifth AFC championship game at home, and with Saturday’s 31–13 win over the Raiders, Kansas City locked up the conference’s No. 1 seed for the third time in Mahomes’s five years. He has also thrown for more than 4,500 yards and 35 touchdowns in four of those five years. The exception came in ’19 due to injury.
And how about, with all that history in mind, we end the drama and give Mahomes—the guy who reached the top of the league at his position right away, has stayed there for a half decade now and already has his Hall of Fame coach comparing him to all-time greats—the second MVP of his career.
It’s become clear this year how rare what Mahomes has done is, and how readily apparent I think it should be that this is the year he wins MVP. Why, then, would it be this year over the others?
Consider what’s happened around Mahomes. After he took a beating in Super Bowl LV against the Buccaneers, the Chiefs completely revamped their offensive line, and Mahomes took it upon himself in 2021 to help that group work through some pretty significant bumps early in the year. Then, earlier this year, the Chiefs off-loaded Tyreek Hill and revamped his crew of wideouts—their top two producers at the position this year, three of the top four, and four of the top six weren’t on the team last year.
Yet, Mahomes barely has missed a beat. And to Reid, that was about more than just Mahomes’s singular greatness, which, of course, is a factor. It was also about what Mahomes did when Reid gave him the first two weeks of the offseason program, when players can’t do football things by rule at the team facility, to gather his new skill group in Dallas.
In fact, when I asked Reid to make the case for Mahomes as MVP (as if that would be needed), it’s the first thing he brought up.
“Maybe the best thing he did was take all those guys down to Texas and get to know them, and that helped him when they came back, kinda being on the same page, at least on the fundamental stuff,” Reid says. “And then we were able to add our new stuff in, and he had a relationship with these guys where he would tell them what to do and they respected that. So I think his leadership—just overall leadership—has been astronomical.
“And then his play on the field, he obviously has made some spectacular plays, knows where everybody’s at, knows when to move, when to stay in the pocket. He’s gotten better with that every year.”
He had a few spectacular moments Saturday in an efficient 202-yard afternoon in which the Chiefs rushed for 168 yards and controlled play from start to finish. One incredible play came on third-and-goal from the Raiders’ 4, three plays after he climbed the pocket to drop a 67-yard bomb to Justin Watson. On the play, Mahomes was chased to his left by star pass rusher Maxx Crosby, and ran to the sideline, looking for an outlet against his body.
And sure enough, through a mass of bodies, he found Jerick McKinnon, another veteran revitalized playing for Reid and with Mahomes, and leisurely flipped the ball to him—giving us another example of sublime play that he’s, somehow, made look routine. When I asked Reid about the impromptu shovel pass, one that required a lot more creativity, vision and body control than people may realize, the coach big-pictured his answer.
“I mean, the expectations are so high, and he exceeds them,” Reid says. “My hat goes off to the kid. And he does it with a smile on his face.”
That brought Reid to the amazing twist to all this—where other quarterbacks may grouse over losing a guy such as Hill, Mahomes used it as an opportunity to improve as a quarterback, learning to better play point guard after years of leaning on the burner and Travis Kelce.
“That’s the part of the equation that people didn’t talk much about—they talked about how it hurt Pat, not how it helped Pat in a way that he would have to grow in different directions,” Reid says. “That’s what he did. And he knew it. He knew what he had to do, so he jumped in, and you gotta give him credit for that. He jumped feet first and helped teach those kids. Made them feel a part of it, and Kelce did, too.”
The result may be Mahomes’s finest season.
And look, I love what Joe Burrow’s done in Cincinnati, where he’s elbowed his way into the conversation for best quarterback in the league—I think he’s the closest thing to Tom Brady stylistically since Brady came into the league. Ditto on Josh Allen, who’s amazing, and lifts his team up in a way no other quarterback can.
But based on what we’ve seen the past four months, I think the debate is done.
Mahomes is the MVP.
