The Kansas City Chiefs could not exactly broadcast it at the time, but they knew. When they signed receiver Sammy Watkins, a former first-round pick, to a three-year, $48 million deal in March 2018, they were guided by a feeling that was known only in the Chiefs facility: that Patrick Mahomes was going to be great. “We were already doing the deal assuming Pat would be an elite-level quarterback. We were already doing our contracts to fit a potentially big contract,” Chiefs general manager Brett Veach told me. “When he was a rookie, as a backup, we were already doing our structures to fit. That’s how much we believed in Patrick.”
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It proved to be a remarkable bit of foresight. Mahomes, whom the Chiefs picked at no. 10 in the 2017 draft, started one meaningless game during his rookie season. He spent most of the year delivering awe-inspiring practice performances. So if Veach revealed at the time of the Watkins signing that the franchise was so convinced of Mahomes’s potential that it was baking that expectation into its free agency negotiations, well, it would have seemed wildly optimistic. Mahomes was also, at the time, at least four years away from the end of his fifth-year option, and possible free agency. It is one thing to have faith in your rookie quarterback. It is yet another to start planning for his mega-extension while he’s a backup.
“We will not,” Veach said, “be caught with our pants down.”
Mahomes, who has two years left on his rookie contract, is eligible for an extension after this season and—please do not read further to avoid spoilers—he will get one. This will affect the Chiefs in countless ways—Watkins, for instance, had a deal that paid him most of his money in the first two years. It’s a very nice football problem to have: Mediocre passers make a lot of money in today’s NFL, so paying a legitimately great one is not much of a burden. The Chiefs have, at present, the reigning MVP in Mahomes, the best offensive mind in the game in head coach Andy Reid, and skill position players who are also in line for new deals, such as Tyreek Hill. The plan to build a roster around Mahomes is one of the biggest subplots in the sport. If the Chiefs nail it, Mahomes is such a talent that the vast majority of teams should just pack it in. That’s why I found my conversation with Veach on Thursday so interesting.
There are two main phases to having a young quarterback in this era: The first is making sure you maximize the years he is cheap, and the second is making sure that the franchise isn’t destroyed when he becomes expensive. The rookie wage cap dictates that Mahomes makes $1.96 million in salary this year with a $4.5 million cap hit. The current quarterback market dictates that Mahomes will make a ton more very shortly. Adam Schefter reported earlier this year that Mahomes could become the league’s first $200 million player. Some things in this world are worth the price tag—Ferraris, oceanfront property, extra guacamole—and Mahomes is one of those things. “I think Pat will get what he deserves, because guys like that do,” Veach said. He joked about Mahomes’s already robust endorsement portfolio, which has him in a pretty good place at the moment. “He’s like LeBron James. He’s a rock star,” Veach said. “He doesn’t fly commercial anymore.” The key, of course, is that if Mahomes is like LeBron James, Veach has to pair him with some Anthony Davises. “We’ve got a lot of talent. We have the league MVP, we have what we believe is the best player in the NFL, but he can’t do it all by himself,” Veach said.
At the Chiefs’ practice on Thursday in St. Joseph, Missouri, Mahomes did Mahomes things: He experimented with trick passes that he might one day try in a real game. He spelled out when, exactly, he might attempt a behind-the-back pass in a game, which is something he does in practice quite often. His answer: The Chiefs would have to be up big, and it would have to be late in the game. You get the feeling the Chiefs might be up big a lot this season, so it’s not out of the question. Last year, Mahomes threw for 50 touchdowns, the most in the league and second most of all time, and 5,097 yards, second in the NFL and eighth best of all time. The Chiefs went 12-4 and appeared in the AFC championship. Their top-ranked offense, which led the NFL in yards, was offset by their defense, which was 31st in yards allowed, and 24th in points allowed. A lot of moves NFL teams make are designed to maximize their quarterback’s cheap contract by adding pieces around him. The Browns traded for Odell Beckham Jr. to pair with Baker Mayfield, for instance. The Rams have focused on adding pieces around Jared Goff. But the Chiefs offense is, for the most part, fine as currently constructed, so maximizing Mahomes means getting their defense to a level where it won’t drag down the offense.
For this season, that meant trading a 2019 first-round pick and a 2020 second-rounder for Seattle pass rusher Frank Clark and signing him to a five-year, $104 million extension that, not surprisingly, pays a lot of money up front (while Mahomes is cheap). It also meant signing safety Tyrann Mathieu in free agency. The Chiefs fired defensive coordinator Bob Sutton and replaced him with Steve Spagnuolo in the offseason, and also added less notable defenders like Darron Lee and Emmanuel Ogbah. The result is an overhauled defense. Despite this being one of Mahomes’s cheap years, Veach scoffs at the notion of the Chiefs being “all in” in 2019. He understands that a team can keep its roster intact by maintaining financial flexibility and utilizing the league’s ever-rising cap effectively—the cap has risen $10 million annually for six years, which is the cost of a potential star in the NFL. “You’ve got to be ‘all in’ every year,” Veach said. “The cap keeps going up, guys can get moved, traded—it’s never like it seems.”
This does not mean the Chiefs haven’t been aggressive. Veach has not picked in the first round in either of his two drafts since the Chiefs promoted him to GM in July 2017. That’s spillover from the trade to move up to select Mahomes, executed by Reid and former GM John Dorsey, and the trade to acquire Clark. “I’m sure we probably would have went corner had we not made that trade,” Veach said of this year’s draft. “But we also had the chance to get a young, productive pass rusher who is also good at playing the run and plays hard.”
Veach knows it’s harder to build a defense than ever before. This is of particular interest to the Chiefs because they were a few defensive mistakes away from the Super Bowl last year. “The challenge is that corners are relied upon because you just have to have so many of them,” he said. “You don’t see base packages anymore. We’re running [dime and nickel] most of the time. So now you don’t just have to find two corners, two safeties, you have to find four safeties and four corners and they are spread out. These guys aren’t just backups they are playing, they are going higher in the draft, harder to get in free agency. Acquiring enough to last the whole season is difficult.”
Finding the right personnel on offense to complement Mahomes is another consideration for Veach. “What changes is what type of parts you are looking for. When you have a guy with that type of arm, the type of receiver you’re looking for. He has no limit in regard to arm strength and to where he can put the ball. There are some guys, 4.3 [40-yard dash] guys, who with some quarterbacks it might not be a great match. With Pat it is,” Veach said. Veach’s point is that some quarterbacks simply don’t have the downfield arm to take advantage of such a fast guy. Mahomes clearly does. This, as it relates to 2019, is in reference to Chiefs second-round pick Mecole Hardman, who runs a 4.3. Hill, drafted by Dorsey, ran a 4.24 at his pro day. Watkins ran a 4.4.
Veach and I have talked about scouting for a Mahomes-like player in the past. Veach told me last season that he studied the on-field chemistry between Antonio Brown and Ben Roethlisberger as the perfect model of how a receiver can help a quarterback who is improvising. Mahomes needs speed because of his big arm, but his talent for making off-balance throws and finding receivers after plays break down necessitates players who are comfortable in the open field and have the smarts to keep the play going when Mahomes is scrambling. We saw this dozens of times in 2018, and as Hardman joins a receiving corps that includes Hill, Watkins, and Travis Kelce, it will probably continue.
I asked Veach whether knowing that the Chiefs offense will score points affects how he builds their defense. Kansas City will be in more shootouts than grind-it-out defensive slugfests. “Subconsciously, probably, yeah” he said. “Are you looking for certain things because you know the offense is going to score a lot of points? Well, yeah, everyone is going to look for more coverage and rush pieces. But if we put a priority on guys who love the process, love game day, and play an aggressive style that’s infectious, it complements the offense.”
Veach has monitored how teams have handled contract negotiations with their quarterbacks—both deals that have already been signed and extensions that are looming. Dak Prescott and Jared Goff, both drafted a year before Mahomes, are the most notable upcoming extensions. Carson Wentz recently signed a four-year deal with the Eagles worth over $100 million in June. The Wentz deal has become a talking point in the league for its complicated structure. Albert Breer reported that on top of the contract’s base salary, its total compensation relied on a hodgepodge of option-year bonuses and roster bonuses. Front offices have begun to pick the brains of Wentz’s agent to understand how it worked.
“It’s not going to catch us by surprise. It’s not going to be, ‘Oh no, what are we gonna do?’” Veach said. “We monitor all the markets and look at how teams structure things and we’re working with a lot of different ideas.”
Here’s one idea they are working with: Mahomes is their present and their future, and he’ll be very rich soon. The key is what the Chiefs do with the other 52 players. They’ve been working on it for three years.