Among the NFL Draft experts, Patrick Mahomes has been a little bit of an enigma. Everyone believes he should go somewhere in the first three rounds, but there’s no overarching consensus on where in the first three rounds. Some have him going in the top five, some have him as a second day prospect, but the debate around him has relied on several unassailable facts:
- Patrick Mahomes throws the football very far
- Patrick Mahomes sometimes makes the near impossible look casual
- Patrick Mahomes can be very loose with the football, he can throw some bad passes
- Patrick Mahomes will have to adjust to life under center as opposed to the shotgun
- Patrick Mahomes has a very high football IQ
- Patrick Mahomes has a style that can frustrate and amaze within seconds
Most everyone that covers NFL Draft prospects can agree on these things, we just don’t know if they’re good things or bad things as it pertains to Mahomes. Gunslingers like Favre have thrived in the NFL, but many more have become crushed by playing against stronger and faster competition. Being a safer QB doesn’t guarantee success though, there have been countless “safe” picks that have bombed their shots.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected from Mahomes’s segment with Jon Gruden on “Gruden’s QB Camp”, or if I expected anything at all.
Gruden had some fun watching @PatrickMahomes5's game film. pic.twitter.com/r36c6paVD9
— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) April 13, 2017
It was solid, a good introduction to who Patrick Mahomes is, and why he makes the decisions he makes, what his weaknesses are, and what his strengths are. I still can’t help but think that the segment sounded like a Twitter argument about where he will go in the draft, though.
All of the main points were hit, but none of them hit an in-depth way. There’s a very real and very logical argument for drafting Patrick Mahomes later, but none of it involves Mahomes’s under center stance from a time where he was in the shotgun 99.9% of the time. There’s a very real and very logical argument for drafting Patrick Mahomes in the top 10, but none of it involves him throwing a football from his knees, which is in fact not a throw you can legally make in football.
In the end, this wasn’t meant to be an in-depth segment. You can still do better than rehashing everything that’s been said since Mahomes was a sophomore in college. These episodes are at their best when they allow the quarterbacks to diagram a play and let them explain their thought processes and reads for extended periods of time. Patrick Mahomes has the “wow” factor, anyone can find a highlight tape on YouTube and see this. It just would’ve been nice to see something outside the already beaten to death narrative that seemingly revolves around every single dual threat “gunslinger” that declares for the draft.
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