NEW ORLEANS—Everyone who picks up a football these days dreams of throwing it like Patrick Mahomes.
He makes no-look passes, tosses it one way while his body moves the other and turns plays that look doomed into enormous gains through his uncanny ability to elude pass rushers. Mahomes takes the stuff of kids on the playground and pulls it off against the best football players on the planet.
The problem for anyone attempting to play like Mahomes is that Mahomes has proven inimitable.
But that hasn’t stopped a generation of quarterbacks from trying—and looking foolish in the process. They mimic his style, without his otherworldly gift for improvisation, and learn the hard way that Mahomes is the exception, not the rule. Keen observers of the position look at up-and-coming passers and see eroding fundamentals everywhere they look.
“We’re seeing the greatest in the world do something that’s so rare, and we think, ‘Oh, I should be able to do that,’” says two-time MVP quarterback Kurt Warner. “And too many guys get off track because of it.”
Mahomes’s unique abilities are the reason the Chiefs are in position to become the first three-peat champions in modern NFL history when they take on the Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl. Over the course of that run, he has made everyone rethink how to play quarterback. He took the traditional blueprint—operating from the confines of the pocket, as mastered by Joe Montana and Tom Brady—and incinerated it in a Kansas City barbecue pit.
What sets Mahomes apart isn’t merely his ability to make plays on the run—plenty of others have used their legs to expand the definition of what it means to play quarterback. The difference is that Mahomes’s sorcery comes even as he routinely flouts the position’s fundamentals.
But attempting to replicate that instead of building their styles around more traditional techniques can be a recipe for disaster. After all, before Picasso began rearranging faces on canvas, he painted traditional portraits. Bob Dylan first conquered folk music before he went electric.
“There’s guys that do certain arm angles when they get out of the pocket, and if you have some of what Pat has, then great,” says Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy. “If you don’t, be yourself.
There’s now a growing crew of quarterbacks who entered the league as prospects hailed for their ability to create off-script plays only to discover that it’s not nearly as easy as Mahomes makes it look.
Caleb Williams struggled during his rookie season with the Chicago Bears. Photo: Alex Slitz/Getty Images
Perhaps no quarterback prospect was compared to Mahomes more often than Caleb Williams. Long before the Chicago Bears drafted him last year, Williams was hyped as a future No. 1 pick because his game looked so distinctly Mahomesian. At USC, he thrived slinging the ball side-arm, extending plays with his feet and still launching passes deep downfield.
Then Williams’s rookie season with the Bears showed how much more difficult it is to freewheel like that in the NFL. The same plays that produced highlights in college frequently wound up with Williams slumped on the turf picking grass out of his facemask. By the time the season was over, he was the second-most sacked rookie quarterback of all time.
Time will tell if Williams recovers, but he’s far from the first quarterback to struggle after earning comparisons to Mahomes. Zach Wilson was the No. 2 overall pick by the New York Jets in 2021, and he spent most of his time with the team aimlessly darting around the backfield like he was looking for directions to the Holland Tunnel. The team ditched him after three seasons in which he threw more interceptions than touchdowns.
“We’ve fallen in love with the “Wow!” things that these guys do nowadays,” Warner says. “That’s why we see so many guys at the lower levels that are wildly inconsistent. They have all the talent in the world, but they don’t have the technique to lead and guide them.”
Zach Wilson was a disappointment after being selected with the No. 2 pick in 2021 by the New York Jets. Photo: Associated Press
The question of replicating genius with unorthodox technique isn’t unique to football. An entire generation of tennis players grew up trying—and mostly failing—to copy Rafael Nadal’s shoulder-wrenching topspin. And most people who tried the extreme windup of retired pitcher Tim Lincecum ended up firing balls into the dugout.
“Pat is himself,” says Chiefs quarterback coach David Girardi. “There’s a lot of great quarterbacks in this league and at the end of the day you’ve got to play the game the way that you know how to play the game.”
That explains why most of the successful young quarterbacks these days hardly resemble the man vying to win his fourth Super Bowl before the age of 30. The Houston Texans’ C.J. Stroud, who made the Pro Bowl as a rookie in 2023, has thrived in the pocket and led his team to back-to-back playoff appearances in his first two seasons.
And Jayden Daniels emerged as a rookie sensation for Washington this year in large part due to his speed, but his personal coach Ryan Porter says his success is more rooted in his mastery of the game’s basics. Porter has helped Daniels model his footwork after Troy Aikman, for instance, by running endless three- and five-step drop practices instead of scramble drills.
“We’ve been teaching him this since he was a baby,” Porter says.
Which isn’t to say that others won’t come along and some day stun the NFL like Mahomes. But as quarterback after quarterback has shown, the best way to do that might start with playing nothing like him.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
Patrick Mahomes’s unique abilities are the reason the Chiefs are in position to become the first three-peat champions in modern NFL history. Photo: denny medley/Reuters
