One of the questions that won’t go away, though it should, is whether Patrick Mahomes would have been a great quarterback if the Bears had taken him, and not Mitch Trubisky, with the second overall pick in the 2017 draft.
The other day, I heard one of ESPN’s many NFL analysts arguing in the negative during one of the network’s many hours devoted to what the Bears should do with Justin Fields. His assessment, shared by many, is that the Bears’ coaching staff has been so bad for so long that Mahomes wouldn’t have known what a forward pass was by the time the team was done ruining his career. We heard this same pronouncement about a hypothetical Bears-Mahomes marriage throughout Trubisky’s four years here, and it has carried on through Fields’ up-and-down career.
It’s absurd.
Mahomes played in one game his rookie season with the Chiefs, then was phenomenal every year after. If I have this right, the coaching he received in that one season on the sideline was so profound that it unlocked in him something he never would have found anywhere else, especially not in Chicago. Yeah, about that: Sorry, no. It doesn’t add up. What Mahomes’ story suggests, at high decibel levels, is that he was good when he arrived in Kansas City and that, after a year sitting behind Alex Smith, that goodness was ready to burst into something special. The proof of that was the 50 freaking touchdown passes he threw in 2018, his first year as a starter.
No one was going to ruin Mahomes because he was ruin-proof. Not even the Bears, with a history of quarterback illiteracy, could have made him mediocre.
Fields wasn’t ruin-proof, and it’s possible he was damaged by the coaches who were charged with teaching him. But it’s more likely that the three years we’ve seen of Fields tell us exactly what he is and what he was always going to be. At some point, it’s on the player to succeed.
The idea that Mahomes wouldn’t have been a star if he had landed in Chicago is fantasy football. Have you seen the things he does that can’t be coached? The no-look passes? The touch? The precision? The ability to extend plays?
There’s a reason he’s mentioned in the same breath as Tom Brady, and that reason is not Chiefs coach Andy Reid, just as Brady’s greatness isn’t solely tied to Bill Belichick. By the time he’s done, Mahomes could surpass Brady’s seven Super Bowl rings. He has two so far, having led the Chiefs to four Super Bowl appearances the past five years. He goes for another ring Sunday against the 49ers. It’s kind of hard to ignore him, as much as Bears fans would like to.
I’ve heard from several readers who say it’s wrong to criticize former Bears general manager Ryan Pace for missing on Mahomes, whom the Chiefs chose 10th overall out of Texas Tech. It’s unfair, they say, because A) very few scouts and draft experts were that high on Mahomes and B) eight other teams that had the opportunity to draft Mahomes passed on him, too.
This brings us to the No. 1 skill that owners look for in a general manager: vision. It was Pace’s job to be able to see a talent as transcendent as Mahomes. He didn’t. He only had eyes for Trubisky. If somebody had held up three fingers to Pace in 2017 and asked him to count the digits, he would have responded, “Can you repeat the question?”
Bears offensive coordinator Luke Getsy had a rough two years here before coach Matt Eberflus fired him after this season. His offense wasn’t productive, and Fields’ strides weren’t nearly as big as the team and the fan base had hoped. In sports, the default reaction is to blame coaches, and Chicago is no different. So Getsy became the devil. But if he’s so horrible, terrible and possibly contagious, why did the Raiders hire him as their offensive coordinator after the Bears canned him? Go ahead and blame it on the NFL retread carousel if you want, but that argument doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Getsy and former Bears coach Matt Nagy, the de facto offensive coordinator when he was in town, would have done just fine with Mahomes. Every coach with a headset and a visor would have done just fine with Mahomes. Remember that Sunday when you’re watching him be what he can’t help being: great.
