In the days before his first Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes was on a practice field with a small group of offensive players and coaches while the rest of the team worked on special teams.
In Mahomes’ early years as an NFL quarterback, the Kansas City Chiefs’ special teams period had become his personal lab — the time he could push the boundaries of what was possible, breaking rules, inventing plays, experimenting with new mechanics. Chiefs coach Andy Reid had a phrase for that way of thinking: “I’m giving you the keys,” he’d say.
At practice before the biggest game of his young career, Mahomes turned the keys and floored the gas. As he sprinted out to his right, he pulled the ball down and went full Magic Johnson, flinging a behind-the-back pass to tight end Travis Kelce. Deland McCullough, the Chiefs’ running backs coach at the time, watched in stunned silence.
“I’m not talking about Travis being 10 yards away,” McCullough said. “Travis might have been 25, 30 yards away.”
It wasn’t the last time Mahomes flirted with a behind-the-back pass. He teased the possibility in interviews and lobbied Reid to let him try it in a game, convinced he could pull it off. Last season, former Chiefs receiver Marcus Kemp was so sure that Mahomes still wanted to attempt a behind-the-back pass that he was hesitant to talk about it.
“I think Pat is still trying to get it in,” Kemp said. “He has been for probably three years now.”
When Mahomes finally pulled it out in the preseason, finding Kelce against the Lions on Aug. 17, the internet did its usual thing. But the most revealing reaction came from Reid, the man who loaned Mahomes the keys years ago.
“I’ve been telling you to do that for a while,” Reid told his quarterback.
The Reid-Mahomes partnership is already one of the most successful in NFL history.
In the six seasons since Mahomes became the full-time starter, no team in the league has won more games or scored more points. There are also the three Super Bowl trophies, the six straight appearances in the AFC Championship game and the prospect this season of the first Super Bowl three-peat, but the relationship is more than results. It is an innovative force more in line with Lennon-McCartney or Wozniak-Jobs, a prolific duo that thrives on creative collaboration.
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Mahomes says he improvised behind-the-back pass
Reid, the 66-year-old son of a Hollywood set designer, doesn’t want his players to color outside the lines; he wants them to expand the boundaries to somewhere off the page. Mahomes, the 28-year-old son of a major-league pitcher, doesn’t just want to excel at quarterback; he wants to reimagine what the position looks like.
“(Reid) has made this environment around him where he keeps people around who he believes have the same core values,” Kemp said. “I do believe he brought in Pat for that reason.”
“That environment was like, ‘Wow,’” McCullough said. “The juices were always flowing.”
Reid pushed Mahomes to think bigger from their first practices together in 2017. “I want you to stretch the offense,” the coach would tell his quarterback again and again.
That meant taking deep shots. Forcing tight-window throws. Exploring what was possible, even if it meant Mahomes might occasionally fail.
“Let’s see how far we can take it,” Reid would say.
As the two became more comfortable with each other — and as Mahomes displayed rare talent — they fostered a creative energy that allowed them to bring the most out of their individual abilities. Reid was the offensive guru who would try anything, the kind of tinkerer who once put a 350-pound nose tackle at running back and implored his assistants to follow a simple rule: “Don’t Judge.” Mahomes was the quarterback who believed he could pull off anything, a risk-taker who unleashed his first no-look pass during the fourth quarter of a close game in college.
Veteran players in Kansas City began to notice something in the early years.
“That youthful exuberance that Pat has has rubbed off on Coach and gave him some extra life,” said Mitchell Schwartz, a former Chiefs offensive lineman. “Because he didn’t have to be quite so regimented. He had this guy who was able to do what he wanted to do.”
Reid’s willingness to explore allowed Mahomes to tap into the full depth of his unique and often unconventional skills. When Mahomes was backing up Alex Smith in 2017, he ran the scout team. One day, Reid whistled and called over Brad Childress, then the team’s assistant head coach. Reid told Childress to pull out his play sheet and start marking plays: “Play 3, Play 5, Play 6, Play 8 … ”
Reid had just witnessed Mahomes throw at least four no-look passes, bewildering veteran linebacker Justin Houston and the rest of the first-team defense.
“Justin Houston’s reaction — it was unbelievable,” Childress said. “He looked in the flat. He looked at the quarterback. He looked where the ball got completed. He looked at Coach Reid. He looked back at the quarterback. He looked back at the flat. He’s like: ‘What just happened?’”
Reid kept his poker face. Just watch the film of those plays, he told Childress. But Childress had been around long enough to know: Reid was hiding a smile.
Patrick Mahomes confers with Andy Reid before Super Bowl LVIII in February. (Harry How / Getty Images)
When Schwartz played for the Chiefs from 2016 to 2020, the team held a walkthrough practice on Tuesday after they watched film. Players wore regular clothes. No cleats. Pretty casual vibe.
There was one unique feature: Every week, Reid wandered around with a little piece of paper scribbled with new plays even his assistant coaches hadn’t seen before. To players and coaches, Reid looked like a man weaving through a full-sized chess board, pulling receivers into new spots, moving a tight end a few yards this way, trying to visualize the geometry.
It wasn’t a solo process. Reid would hold a notecard up in the huddle, allowing players to, as Kemp said, “figure it out in their mind.” Then they would line up. Usually the play didn’t even have a name.
“He might go through seven or eight things and maybe four of them make the cut,” McCullough said.
The process felt so elemental — as if a play was being invented in real-time — that it demystified the process. Players were empowered to offer their own suggestions and tweaks. It was exactly what Reid wanted.
“That’s where Patrick started to feel comfortable enough to create those plays by himself,” Kemp said. “It was seeing the head man do it and work through it on the field. You didn’t have to have a perfect play that you had to bring to him.”
Under Reid, the Chiefs are famous for mining plays from anywhere: friends, rivals, college games, the 1948 Rose Bowl. Even from insane-seeming ideas during walkthroughs.
“I feel like Coach just kind of observes stuff Pat does during practice having fun and is like, ‘Hmm, that could be pretty cool,’” Schwartz said.
The most outside-the-box collaboration of the Reid-Mahomes era came on Jan. 7, 2023. That was the day the Chiefs ran “Arctic Circle” — otherwise known as the “Circle of Death” — a play that began with a spinning huddle and descended into pure anarchy.
Running back Jerick McKinnon lined up in the shotgun, ran a run-pass option, then flipped the ball to Mahomes, who stopped and threw the ball back across the field to receiver Kadarius Toney, who scampered into the end zone only for the touchdown to be wiped out by a holding penalty.
The plan was pure razzle-dazzle, but the spinning huddle was even weirder. The only people who weren’t fazed were the players on the field.
“We had seen it for pretty much for the entire year in different capacities,” Kemp said.
The play had been born at a series of Saturday walkthroughs, when the Chiefs would run through a list of Hail Marys and end-of-game trick plays. After running many of the same looks for four or five years, the staff started looking for ways to spice it up.
“That’s a time for Pat and the entire offense to get creative,” Kemp said. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s legal or not.”
At some point, someone wondered: What if we all started spinning in a circle before breaking the huddle?
What looked like chaos was actually a finely edited script: Reid took a weird idea and broke it down step by step, one of the hallmarks of his success. “He’ll poke out the details of it so he can teach it over and over and over again,” Kemp said. “He told everybody specifically what direction to turn and when to break and who was going to call it and where the receivers needed to end up and how they needed to do specific things. I think that’s why it worked out: details.”
After several Saturdays of tinkering and perfecting the circle-of-death concept, Reid signed off: Let’s put it in.
Of course, Mahomes has the kind of talent that makes any idea seem like a good one. “Pat is one of those dudes that is really good at a lot of things he does,” Kemp said, “so he’ll do something randomly and it will just click for him or a coach and they’ll find a way to incorporate it.”
When Mahomes took over as the starter in 2018, he started lobbying to throw a shovel pass underhand because he thought it would disguise the play better than a traditional shovel pass. When the timing didn’t work, Reid built a new formation over the course of two or three weeks so it would.
The play became a staple.
Around the same time, Mahomes started making center Austin Reiter practice snaps on the run. It began as another fun practice experiment, but soon enough the quarterback was asking assistant coach Tom Melvin if it was legal, and then he took it to the finishing lab — the special teams period — where he worked on plays with Kelce. All that was left was Reid, who installed a play called “Ferrari Right.”
“Coach Reid knows that fine line where he’s just crazy enough but just safe enough,” said Anthony Gordon, a former Chiefs quarterback.
“It was never a tense environment,” added Matt McGloin, another former quarterback. “It was always fun. It was always exciting. You were always learning, which was incredible. It was always a big collaborative effort.”
One day before the 2018 season, Mahomes and Reid ran through a play sheet for an upcoming preseason game. Mahomes had made one career start, against Denver the previous year, and Reid was in his 20th season as an NFL head coach. But when Mahomes said he didn’t like one of the plays in the game plan, Reid crossed it off.
“That’s the confidence that Andy had in his players,” McGloin said.
Six years later, the partnership thrives.
On the eve of last season’s AFC Championship Game in Baltimore, Mahomes sat in another meeting with Reid as the team’s offensive staff talked through end-of-game plays. If they needed to convert a third-and-long to win the game, Mahomes said he wanted a play that could beat man-to-man coverage and counter the Ravens’ pressure.
The next night, the Chiefs led the Ravens 17-10 with 2:19 left. It was third and 9. Mahomes walked over to the sideline.
“Give me the ball,” he said.
Reid knew the play Mahomes wanted. He handed the keys to Mahomes again.
The Chiefs lined up three receivers to the left, the Ravens showed Cover Zero, and Mahomes found receiver Marques Valdes-Scantling on a deep shot over the middle, sending Kansas City back to the Super Bowl.
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Ryan Kang / Getty Images; David Eulitt / Getty Images)
