Patrick Mahomes joined Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, to talk about several subjects including some hilarious draft-day details.
For the last several years, the majority of credit for drafting Patrick Mahomes, who is now arguably the best player in the National Football League, has gone to the men who were leaders of the Kansas City Chiefs front office in the year he was drafted. Both John Dorsey and Brett Veach held the general manager title that year and both men were responsible in part for the genius that went after Mahomes with a franchise-defining trade back in that 2017 NFL Draft.
However, as it turns out, a few others deserve credit as well.
Mahomes, who is the current front-runner for his second MVP award, recently sat down with his friend and teammate Travis Kelce along with Eagles center Jason Kelce for an episode of their podcast New Heights. It’s a chance to hear Patrick like you rarely get to hear him on a number of subjects and the entire interview is worth a listen (see below), but for our purposes, we loved hearing about Mahomes on draft day.
As it turns out, current assistant coach Matt Nagy and even Mahomes himself deserve some of the credit.
In terms of Nagy’s involvement, Mahomes said that he was taking a Top 30 prospect visit to Arrowhead Stadium before the actual draft. Andy Reid, the team’s head coach, was scheduled to pepper him with questions about some set plays. Nagy gave Mahomes the plays the night before to let him study and impress Reid all the more, clearly because Nagy wanted him in K.C. so much. Mahomes, of course, aced the interview.
Even beyond that, Mahomes himself helped the Chiefs figure out where they would need to draft him. Specific teams were telling Mahomes where they were going to draft him, and as the Chiefs quarterback tells the story, he was relaying that info to the Chiefs to tell them the range around which he would no longer be available. Specifically, he told the Chiefs they’d have to get to No. 12 or higher.
The end result was a trade with the Buffalo Bills at No. 10 overall, a move up the draft that secured for them the most popular player in the game and a quarterback that would turn them into perennial Super Bowl favorites. And all of that was secretly aided by Nagy’s willingness to cheat and Mahomes’ own information campaign.
See the whole episode below: