Exploring the hoops behind the football magic of Chiefs superstar Patrick Mahomes

As an exclamation point in warmups before each Chiefs game, Patrick Mahomes throws the ball as if shooting a teardrop jumper through the waiting arms of a teammate simulating a basket.

If he has his way, he will one day expand his investment portfolio in professional sports franchises, which includes stakes in the Royals, Sporting KC and KC Current, as part of an NBA ownership group, preferably for Kansas City.

And while the Chiefs quickly put the brakes on his basketball leanings after witnessing a 2019 viral video of his spin game at Life Time Fitness in Overland Park, Kansas, he certainly makes use of his home indoor court, and such He sometimes still takes advantage of the hoop in the locker room inside the Chiefs’ practice facility.

All of these snapshots reflect not only an abiding love for the game itself, but also something deeper: how basketball animates the pioneering way he plays quarterback.

While it is well known that baseball has influenced the style and imagination of the superstar whose father pitched in the major leagues for 11 seasons, Mahomes himself believes that basketball has had a stronger influence on his football.

Because having played point guard in particular, he said, is vital to feeling the traffic around you and “finding a way to throw the ball and get it into the space you wanted.”

“People talk about baseball because of arm angles and throwing accuracy and things like that,” Mahomes, a 37th-round pick by the Detroit Tigers in 2014, said in an interview during the Chiefs’ bye week. . “But… (basketball) has probably been the biggest factor, rather than playing football, on how to make space and find the open guy.

“And I think that’s something I’ve used my entire career.”

‘How many people can really do that?’

Look closely, and that’s emphatically evident in the unorthodox ways that have propelled Mahomes to become a two-time NFL MVP and three-time Super Bowl MVP, with the 6-0 Chiefs now looking to become the first to win three consecutive Super Bowls.

In any given game, Mahomes incorporates the kind of moves — to make space and time, find openings and devise ways to distribute the ball — that are almost indivisible from what it takes to excel on the court.

Brent Kelley, Mahomes’ basketball coach his senior year at Whitehouse (Texas) High, sees it in how Mahomes navigates “the chaos of every play” and his uncanny ability to make split-second decisions and move on to the next play even when something happens. goes wrong.

Ryan Tomlin, who coached Mahomes during his first three years of high school, sees it particularly in Mahomes’ keen awareness of everything around him, a trait that Chiefs coach Andy Reid and general manager Brett Veach often points out every facet of Mahomes.

And we can all see it in many ways: a left-handed or no-look pass, coming in underneath or with a twisting movement or a hesitation fake.

Or even do it behind his back, like Mahomes did in a preseason game against the Lions.

“Patrick Mahomes took it seriously that NFL players can’t play in the NBA debate and took the basketball court to the football field with this BEAUTY BEHIND HER BACK,” the former ESPN broadcaster and quarterback wrote of the NFL Robert Griffin III on X (Twitter) in time. “Don’t compare any QB to him, he’s in A WORLD OF HIS OWN.”

Take it from the Harlem Globetrotters, who made a tribute video to Mahomes three years ago expressed through the voices of three players: “The Harlem Globetrotters have been the innovators of basketball for 94 years… But there’s a guy in the NFL who reminds us of us. … Patrick Mahomes makes us look at football in a whole new way.”

And take it from the University of Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self, a Mahomes admirer.

“They say a good point guard can count to 10,” Self said Wednesday at Big 12 media day. “Patrick can count to 22 and knows where the 11 is on both sides at all times.”

With some sense of wonder in his voice, Self added: “How many people can really do that?”

A feeling of where it is

There are very few, if any, actually, at least not in this area.

And it evokes what author John McPhee was referring to in his book about then-Princeton star Bill Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are.”

The title derived from an exchange between McPhee and Bradley that led Bradley to explain how over time he could sense where he was without looking: After throwing a ball over his shoulder at the basket while looking McPhee in the eyes, McPhee recovered the ball and returned it to him.

“’When you’ve been playing basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you’re that close,’” Bradley said before throwing it over his shoulder again toward the rim. “ ‘You develop a sense of where you are.’ “

In Mahomes’ case, it’s hard to know to what extent a seemingly innate sense of awareness and anticipation (not to mention essentially a photographic memory) made him such a natural at basketball (and to what extent basketball honed that innate sense).

Because this goes back forever with Mahomes.

Long before Tom Brady, during last week’s Fox broadcast of the Chiefs-49ers game, commented on Mahomes’ “spatial awareness” and said that “it’s almost like he sees (in) 3D, one of the first coaches of Mahomes and a family friend talked about Mahomes. having what he likes to call a “geospatial magic box.”

That beautiful mind, Chad Parker said during my visit to Whitehouse, Texas in 2019, allows Mahomes to constantly interpret and calibrate what is around him and before him.

“Where am I? Where are the friendly ones? Where are the enemies? When might they move in? Parker then said. “What are the obstacles and how do I navigate between them? What is the environment? What does it mean?”

‘Just seeing things’

Although he didn’t put it in those terms, that dynamic was essentially the first impression for Tomlin, Mahomes’ basketball coach during his first three years at Whitehouse High.

When he first saw Mahomes play in the Little Dribblers program in sixth grade, what stood out the most was that Mahomes was making passes that other kids didn’t or couldn’t make, for one particular reason.

“Just seeing things; that’s what I noticed,” Tomlin said in a phone interview Thursday, adding that the same thing could be said “ever since. It’s crazy; “That has never changed.”

By then, Mahomes’ incredible arm was already well-known: When he was 8, he threw a one-handed bomb across three quarters of a shortened court to tie a game at the buzzer.

But that was more because his football aptitude filtered into basketball than the other way around. It is the other way around that draws Tomlin’s attention the most.

“The ball was just part of his hand,” he said, noting that Mahomes was such a “master at reading the situation and reading people” that the game (any game, really) is slower for him than others.

That’s why, he said, when Mahomes is on the move, in his mind he’s already counteracting defensive reactions with an anticipation that’s both instinctive and studied.

Even when a coach may not immediately appreciate what he’s doing, as Tomlin once recounted when Mahomes got caught in what he likes to call the “stupid corner” before half court.

“You just don’t do it; “It’s stupid,” he said.

Furious while wondering “what is he doing?” He watched in awe as Mahomes stepped back, jumped and threw what he called a no-look diagonal pass for a breakaway basket.

On the bench after the play, Tomlin said he turned to an assistant and said, “Maybe we’re the dumb ones.”

During his junior year, Mahomes averaged 19.9 points, 3.4 assists, 6.7 rebounds and four steals per game, even as it became increasingly clear that football was his future.

But Tomlin credits that watching Mahomes play basketball improved Texas Tech football coach Kliff Kingsbury’s understanding and interest in Mahomes, who today was unfathomably under the radar at the time.

When I asked Mahomes in 2022 if Tech had been among the first to recruit him as a quarterback, he said, “They really were the first and only.” Furthermore, like Andy Reid today, Kingsbury did not seek to restrict Mahomes but rather allowed him to amplify what made him different.

You can see that in many highlights of Mahomes playing basketball available online, like the ones NBA star Steph Curry once critiqued for NFL Live, including Curry’s own interpretation of how basketball appears in Mahomes’ game today.

“You always have a choice; “I think that’s how Pat sees the game,” he said. “And for me, as a point guard, that’s what you try to feel: You always have the option to take the ball where you want it to go.”

‘The Houdini of our era’

Kelley witnessed the first game he coached senior Mahomes at Whitehouse High.

Mahomes had practiced only one day before the game due to the extended football season. But one play stood out in that game and has done so ever since: Mahomes, off-balance, grabbed a rebound and, as he fell, threw a pass that nearly spanned the entire court.

As Kelley went through his phone earlier this week deleting videos to make some space, that was one of the Mahomes highlights he couldn’t bear to delete.

“I think I’m coaching a pro,” he recalled texting a friend after that game.

It was just a matter of which sport, Kelley said, for a guy who had the “it” factor in three of them, and who is a living testament to the benefits of playing multiple games rather than specializing.

But no game would have brought all of this together like football has for Mahomes, a point that is perhaps more evident (and critical) now than ever.

With the Chiefs depleted by injuries to receivers, something they hope to make up for with the acquisition of DeAndre Hopkins, Self correctly noted that Mahomes hasn’t had the weapons he once had, and that the Chiefs aren’t going downfield as much as they used to.

“And they’re better than ever,” he said.

At least in part, Self added, that’s because Mahomes understands that winning is as much about executing the simplest plays (those that essentially look like keeping the ball moving in basketball) as it is about some of the big ones.

Even though those plays might seem to Brady like they were breaking “every quarterback rule I ever learned,” as the all-time great put it during last Sunday’s Chiefs-Niners broadcast from Santa Clara, California.

Just as Mahomes broke those barriers in 2022 in his final game against Brady, when the Chiefs won at Tampa Bay, 41-31, with the help of Mahomes’ 2-yard touchdown pass to Clyde Edwards-Helaire… after that Mahomes would have run almost 40 yards in the backfield.

Afterward, Mahomes called the play “a spin and a little bit, I don’t know, basketball pass.”

A crucial part of the arsenal that makes him the “Houdini of our era,” as Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce put it after that game… and as we witness every week.