Exploring the hoops behind Chiefs superstar Patrick Mahomes’ football wizardry

As an exclamation point on preliminary warmups before every Chiefs game, Patrick Mahomes flicks the football as if shooting a so-called teardrop jumper through the waiting arms of a teammate simulating a basket.

If he has his way, some day he’ll add to his professional sports franchise investment portfolio — which includes stakes in the Royals, Sporting KC and KC Current — as part of an NBA ownership group, preferably for Kansas City.

And though the Chiefs promptly put the kibosh on his pickup basketball inclinations after witnessing a viral 2019 video of his whirling game at a Life Time Fitness in Overland Park, Kan., no doubt he makes use of the indoor court at his home, and perhaps still avails himself to the hoop in the locker room inside the Chiefs’ practice facility.

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

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

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

“People talk about baseball because of the arm angles and the accuracy throwing and stuff 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 most deciding factor, rather than actually playing football, of how to make space and find the open guy.

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

‘How many people can really do that?’

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

Any given game, Mahomes incorporates the sort of moves — to make space and time and find openings and concoct ways of distributing the ball — that are almost indivisible from what it takes to excel on the hardwood.

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 goes awry.

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

And we can all see it in numerous ways: a left-handed or no-look pass, coming in underhand or with a spin move or a hesitation fake.

Or even going behind the back, as Mahomes pulled off in a preseason game against the Lions.

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

Take it from the Harlem Globetrotters, who made a video tribute 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 has us looking at football in a whole new way.”

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

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

With a certain sense of wonder in voice, Self added, “How many people can really do that?”

A sense of where he is

Precious few, if any, really, at least not in this arena.

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

The title was derived from an exchange between McPhee and Bradley that led to Bradley explaining how over time he could feel where he was without looking: After tossing a ball over his shoulder into the basket while looking McPhee in the eye, McPhee retrieved the ball and handed it back to him.

“ ‘When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,’ ” Bradley said before throwing it over his shoulder again right into the hoop. “ ‘You develop a sense of where you are.’ ”

In the case of Mahomes, it’s hard to know how much an apparently innate sense of awareness and anticipation — not to mention essentially a photographic memory — made him such a natural at basketball (and how much basketball honed that innate sense).

Because this can be traced back to forever in 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 Mahomes’ first coaches and a family friend spoke of Mahomes having what he likes to call a “geo-spatial magic box.”

That beautiful mind, Chad Parker said during my 2019 visit to Whitehouse, Texas, enables Mahomes to constantly be interpreting and calibrating what’s around and before him.

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

‘Just seeing things’

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

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

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

By then, Mahomes’ incredible arm already was a known commodity: As an 8-year-old, he launched a one-handed bomb three-quarters of a shortened court to tie a game at the buzzer.

But that was more a case of his football aptitude seeping into basketball than vice versa. It’s the other way around that most strikes Tomlin.

“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 to him than others.

Because of that, he said, when Mahomes is on the move, in his mind he’s already countering defensive reactions with anticipation that is both instinctive and studied.

Even when a coach might not immediately appreciate what he’s doing, as Tomlin recounted one time when Mahomes got himself trapped in what he likes to call the “stupid corner” before halfcourt.

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

Fuming as he wondered “what is he doing?” he watched in wonder as Mahomes retreated, sprung up and threw what he called a diagonal no-look pass for a breakaway basket.

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

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

But Tomlin reckons that seeing Mahomes play basketball enhanced Texas Tech football coach Kliff Kingsbury’s understanding of and interest in Mahomes, who unfathomably today was below 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 were really the first and only.” Moreover, much like Andy Reid today, Kingsbury didn’t seek to restrict Mahomes but allowed him to amplify what made him different.

You can see that in any number of 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 shows up in Mahomes’ game today.

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

‘The Houdini of our era’

Kelley bore witness to that in the first game he coached the senior Mahomes at Whitehouse High.

Mahomes had practiced just for one day before the game because of the extended football season. But one play stood out in that game and has ever since: An off-balance Mahomes snared a rebound and, as he was falling, whipped a pass almost the length of the court.

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

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

It was just a matter of in what sport, Kelley said, for a guy who had the “it” factor in three of them — and who is living testimony to the benefits of playing several instead of specializing.

But no game would have brought it all together like football has for Mahomes, a point that’s perhaps more evident — and pivotal — now than ever.

With the Chiefs depleted by receiver injuries, something they hope to make up for with the acquisition of DeAndre Hopkins, Self correctly observed that Mahomes hasn’t had the weapons he once did — and that the Chiefs don’t go downfield nearly as much as they used to.

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

At least in part, Self added, that’s because Mahomes understands that winning is as much about executing the more simple plays — ones that in essence resemble keeping the ball moving in basketball — as a few big ones.

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

Much like Mahomes broke those barriers in 2022 in his last 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 Mahomes had run nearly 40 yards in the backfield.

Afterward, Mahomes called the play “a spin and a little, 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 about every week.