Legend of the Long Toss: Stories of Patrick Mahomes II’s Awe-Inspiring Passing
The no-look pass, the left-handed throw, the deep bomb. The Chiefs QB is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the passing game. The secret, as Mahomes, his teammates, and coaches explain, is practicing the impossible throw until it becomes ordinary.Legend of the Long Toss: Stories of Patrick Mahomes II’s Awe-Inspiring Passing
The no-look pass, the left-handed throw, the deep bomb. The Chiefs QB is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the passing game. The secret, as Mahomes, his teammates, and coaches explain, is practicing the impossible throw until it becomes ordinary.
Nothing Patrick Mahomes II does is by accident. He has become a nearly overnight superstar, epitomizing improvisational genius at the NFL level. When he throws a no-look pass, or across his body or with his non-dominant left hand, it appears to be a fleeting moment of ingenuity, a throw brainstormed on the spot. It is most certainly not: Mahomes has practiced impossible throws over and over again until they become normal. He has so thoroughly simulated high-risk passes that they no longer seem risky.
“You talk about no-look passes, and for him to be able to pull that off, I’m sure it was amazing for someone who hasn’t seen it, but he does stuff like that every single day,” says Chiefs quarterbacks coach Mike Kafka. “He’s been doing it since he got here.”
This is the story of how Mahomes’s incredible passes come to be. It combines his unique arm talent, prodigious practice habits, his warm-up routine, a lifelong devotion to training his arm, and a brain that can conjure up the types of passes that have enthralled the NFL this season.
Mahomes is a first-team All-Pro selection in his first year as a starter. The 23-year-old is the presumptive MVP after throwing for 50 touchdowns and 12 interceptions while leading the Chiefs to the top playoff seed in the AFC. They’ll play the Indianapolis Colts in Saturday’s divisional round and have the best chance to bring Kansas City a Super Bowl in at least 15 years. Mahomes is a transcendent player and has become a superstar in a league where the majority of star quarterbacks are older than 35. He’s become a social media phenomenon: His throws are so visually arresting they garner millions of views on YouTube. Game highlights of the Chiefs’ Week 3 game against San Francisco got more than 1 million views. Mahomes’s warm-up routine can end in viral Instagram videos or make headlines—“Patrick Mahomes casually threw a football 90-plus yards during warm-ups”—but that is not its intent. The 90-yard pass serves a specific purpose. It’s designed to make Mahomes better, and it’s working. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t look awesome.
“I think the funniest warm-up throw, I don’t know if it was the most impressive, but it was before the Arizona game,” Mahomes tells me, referencing a November 11 game against the Cardinals. “I didn’t throw the ball but, maybe 60 yards, so it wasn’t even the longest one of the day. But how the sun was, I threw it up and it just disappeared into the sun. It looked like I threw it out of the stadium.”
There are a couple of things to note here. The first is that throwing the ball 60 yards wasn’t that impressive because, well, that distance isn’t impressive for him. The second is that we cannot rule out the possibility of Mahomes actually throwing it out of the stadium.
“What we’re doing is testing our limits,” says Chiefs backup quarterback Chad Henne. Creativity, author Walter Isaacson has said, comes at the intersection of art and science. Mahomes is a rare combination: He can come up with throws that few have thought of, yet has practiced them enough that they work in a game situation.
“All of the behind-the-back and left-handed stuff is for fun,” he tells me about his warm-ups. Well, not exactly. I have to stop him and remind him that he’s already thrown left-handed in a game against the Denver Broncos, so he’s being modest. He laughs. “There is a point in warm-ups where I throw a lot of off-balance left and right across the field because I know there’s a chance I could make those throws in a game. You want to practice this stuff. You don’t want the first time you do it to be in a game.”
The part no one notices, Mahomes tells me, is the fundamentals. That’s where it all starts. The first 12 or 15 throws in warm-ups are short passes to help him get his feet right. He builds from there by simulating every dropback he’ll make in a game. Offensive coaches rave about his perfect foot placement on these throws, which allows him to build up to progressively longer throws with consistency. He is superstitious, performing the same routine for every game. His father, Pat Mahomes, was a major league pitcher, so Patrick Mahomes has a baseball mentality. The younger Mahomes played baseball throughout his life, including at Texas Tech, and could’ve played professionally. Once he gets his footwork down, he does his long-toss exercises, which is where the 80-yard warm-up bombs come from. “That is strictly from baseball,” Patrick Mahomes says. “To me, until I get those long tosses in, I haven’t loosened up my arm. I haven’t gotten my arm going. It’s the same as if someone runs and loosens their legs. It’s my pattern.”
“You talk about no-look passes, and for him to be able to pull that off, I’m sure it was amazing for someone who hasn’t seen it, but he does stuff like that every single day. He’s been doing it since he got here.” — Chiefs quarterbacks coach Mike Kafka
His warm-up partner is Chiefs wide receiver and friend Gehrig Dieter. I ask Mahomes whether teammates find this role challenging considering how long he throws. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I throw a pretty good spiral.”
His warm-up routine has been problematic, however. In high school, when both teams warm up at the same time, Mahomes’s arm was a little too good. “If you’re going to do the normal high school warm-up thing, which is split the field, one team is on one side, you’re on the other, that is not going to be enough room for Patrick Mahomes,” says Adam Cook, Mahomes’s coach at Whitehouse High School. Cook tried to get quarterbacks on the field earlier than everyone to avoid the field congestion. However, the opposing team would often have its punter warming up on the opposite end of the field, leaving him in great danger of being hit with a Mahomes long toss. “It wasn’t intentional,” says Cook. “He’s just warming up, but he’s going to throw into you because he’s throwing it as long as he can throw it.” Cook wanted Mahomes to stretch out his arm because he believed in taking a big, downfield shot early in the game and needed the quarterback’s arm ready. Throwing into the opposing team was collateral damage.
Brad Cook, Adam’s brother and Whitehouse’s offensive coordinator, says that even if Mahomes dinged a punter, no one would say anything. “Because he’s a humble guy, because of his demeanor. He was just trying to see what he could do.” He added that the team had to develop a relay system to retrieve Mahomes’s footballs after 50 yards since no one on the receiving end could be expected to match his distance in throwing it back.
Mahomes’s development as a football player involves a lot of instances of running out of room to warm up. His father said that Patrick “graduated” from playing catch in the family’s backyard when he was around 10 years old. By that age, he could throw a baseball over the outfield fence from home plate, a distance he estimated is between 200 and 220 feet. “We had a pretty big backyard,” Pat Mahomes says. “But it always got to the point where he needed enough room to throw the ball. We went to the baseball field, and eventually the football field.”
Many of the stories Chiefs players and staff members tell about Mahomes in practice come from his rookie season in 2017, when he was behind Alex Smith on the depth chart. It’s not that Mahomes was more impressive then, but his exploits are so common by now that no one is particularly surprised by anything he does anymore.
“There were a couple of throws early on in his rookie year,” Kafka says. “There was one where he was staring at the sideline, and he just flicked it right over Justin Houston’s head. That was the big one. That was the one where other coaches started noticing. I was working with him, and [former Chiefs OC and current Bears coach Matt Nagy] and some of the other coaches had seen it. But once he started to do that everyone said, ‘Oh, he’s really doing this.’”
I asked Houston about this story, and, like the veteran he is, he told me a more detailed story that didn’t involve him getting no-looked. “I was on the sidelines for a throw during OTAs last year,” Houston told me. “He didn’t know the offense, he didn’t know what he was doing, he rolled to his right, the defense opened up, and he threw 30 yards down the field to the left. I’ve been around for a little while, and not a lot of guys can do that.”
Can anyone?
“To be able to throw the ball the way he throws it? I haven’t seen it. No. I saw Aaron Rodgers do a lot of throws, but the way Patrick throws it—he’s special,” Houston says.
When watching Mahomes, safety Eric Murray tells me, “You figure out what is possible and what is not.”
Murray gives an example of what’s possible: “I was guarding a receiver. The dude was in front of me, and I thought, you know, Patrick was going to throw it directly to him, so I broke forward.” (A lot of Mahomes practice stories start with a player assuming that Mahomes is going to do something normal.) “But he floated it,” says Murray. “Like a basketball shot. A floater.” The pass landed behind Murray into the hands of the receiver. Murray had no idea what happened.
“To be able to throw the ball the way he throws it? I haven’t seen it. No. I saw Aaron Rodgers do a lot of throws, but the way Patrick throws it—he’s special.” — Justin Houston
Instances such as these are all part of a plan. “Coach [Andy] Reid wants us to try throws in practice because if you don’t try throws you aren’t going to make them,” Henne says. “So we try to make the most difficult throws we possibly can.” He added that on Fridays, when the rest of the team practices special teams, quarterbacks test out different throws. “Patrick does some freak things in practice, and he’s able to translate it to a game,” Henne says. “There was a throw in Seattle where he came across his body and hit Charcandrick [West]. Unbelievable throw, unbelievable body position, but the thing you have to understand is that he has practiced every throw from every angle.”
I probably heard the phrase “testing the limits” from four or five people when I asked about Mahomes. Most quarterbacks have pretty defined limitations. In August, Mahomes made headlines because of the number of interceptions he was throwing in practice. A similar thing happened to Rodgers once, who responded by saying practice interceptions weren’t necessarily a bad thing. Mahomes takes the same approach. He makes it clear he is not trying to throw interceptions in practice, but they can be a byproduct of his process.
“Especially when we added new plays and are trying different things,” Mahomes says. “Coach Reid told me when I had the opportunity to get the timing down and deep routes in, to see what you can get away with. He told me that on Day 1, and I did. You don’t want to practice making mistakes, and you don’t want to throw a practice interception, but you can see what you can get away with by doing that.”
Or, as his quarterbacks coach Kafka says: “Practice is the perfect time—where there are no consequences and you can adjust and communicate and he can get more confidence in those throws.”
“Coach Reid told me when I had the opportunity to get the timing down and deep routes in, to see what you can get away with. He told me that on Day 1, and I did. You don’t want to practice making mistakes, and you don’t want to throw a practice interception, but you can see what you can get away with by doing that.” — Patrick Mahomes II
“There’s not very much he doesn’t think he can do,” Brad Cook says. “He just likes to know where his limits are and take risks.” Cook says that when Mahomes played seven-on-seven football in the offseason, he threw into the tightest windows possible, especially on deep outs, to increase the difficulty of each throw. Cook thinks that Mahomes wasn’t always challenged in high school, so he found ways to make things difficult for himself. “The defense was doing the best they could against him,” Cook says. When he threw into the net that serves as target practice for quarterbacks, instead of throwing it simply in the net, he would have to pick a specific corner to hit on the way in. “He just wanted an adverse situation.”
And so, as Adam Cook says, Mahomes’s constant heroics have “numbed” everyone around him to them.
“When I first started with him, I thought I was preparing a baseball player,” Pat Mahomes says. “So I taught him some of the things that helped me build arm strength and he made it his own thing.”
He taught his son that the long toss is not about seeing how far you can throw, but about consistency and getting your arm used to throws you’ll make in a game. “You can build strength without lifting weights, and add mobility and flexibility,” Pat Mahomes says. He never wanted to change anything about his son’s unorthodox delivery. He figured it had worked for most of his career and could give him the ability to throw from any arm angle.
“I could chuck the ball around age 5, and that’s because of my dad,” Patrick Mahomes says. It’s an important point: He has had a strong arm since he can remember, and most of his life has been spent figuring out what he can do with it.
Long toss, says baseball trainer Alan Jaeger, has always existed in some form, but it has taken off as a training method for athletes in the past two decades. “It’s innate because you want to stretch your arm out,” says Jaeger, who coached Barry Zito and Dan Haren, among many baseball players. It has become a popular if sometimes debated warm-up routine for pitchers. (Clayton Kershaw is one.) For reference, Jaeger says a 90 mile per hour fastball at a 35-degree angle would go about 300 feet.
Jaeger, who has consulted for many MLB teams, says he was surprised at how little thought NFL quarterbacks have given to stretching out their arms before a game. “What can be learned from long toss in the football world would be mind-altering,” he says. “Long toss gives the arm a full range of motion. You throw the ball incrementally, you start throwing with minimal effort, start adding effort and there’s more of a state of relaxation. The angles get higher, you’re gradually throwing more uphill, and you’re giving your arm and your auxiliary muscles the time to open up or stretch out. It gives it optimal freedom in the arm.”
“My dad has had me long tossing since, well, forever. I think that helped build arm strength, helped build accuracy and touch,” Mahomes says. “That’s something that I’ve always done. I brought it immediately into football.”
“Patrick has been doing the same thing since he started playing quarterback—sidearm passes, no-look, jumping in air, and that’s pretty impressive, but nothing surprises me.” — Pat Mahomes
I asked Pat Mahomes what about his son’s performance has impressed him this year: “Impressed is kind of a big word for me. Patrick has been doing the same thing since he started playing quarterback—sidearm passes, no-look, jumping in air,” Pat Mahomes said. “And that’s pretty impressive, but nothing surprises me.”
As Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy points out, Mahomes’s coaches and teammates catch many of his most impressive warm-up feats on social media because they miss it the first time while in the locker room. That can extend to the field as well, as was the case with Chiefs receiver Demarcus Robinson. He was the recipient of one of Mahomes’s most memorable plays of the season yet didn’t see the full extent of it until later. On December 9, against the Ravens, Robinson was running a simple route across the field when he caught a pass from Mahomes. “I couldn’t see Patrick at all,” Robinson says. Later, on Instagram, Robinson saw the no-look pass that has become one of Mahomes’s most famous throws (there are many). Robinson doesn’t think that pass was even the most impressive in that game. He felt a cross-body pass to Spencer Ware was better.
Catching passes from Mahomes is an adventure, because he is capable of anything and can throw from any arm angle. “You just have to make eye contact with him, look at what he’s looking at and try to know what he’s thinking,” Robinson says. Of course, looking at his eyes doesn’t always tell the story. “You can’t really judge it,” Robinson says. “You have no idea what he’s going to do when he starts to wind up, so you just have to react to the ball when it comes out of his hands.”
No one I spoke with could think of a throw made by another player that was better than one Mahomes has made. I asked Bieniemy which throw made him believe in Patrick. “It was prior to him getting here. Nagy used to say ‘Hey, you’ve got to check this kid out,’ and he’d be on one of those ESPN games,” Bieniemy says. “You see him make all those throws, and Nags is just googly-eyed over him. Then we get him here, and he’s out on the practice field, and he’s throwing these no-look passes, and you’re saying ‘Wait, did he just do what I think he did?’
“And now,” he says. “You’re used to seeing it.”
It’s all part of the plan.