Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) looks at plays with offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, center, and head coach Andy Reid against the New Orleans Saints during the first half at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium on Oct. 7, 2024. Denny Medley Imagn Images
Chiefs general manager Brett Veach has spoken frequently about how he fell in love with quarterback Patrick Mahomes after watching his Texas Tech film ahead of the 2017 Draft.
Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy also was enamored and helped make sure head coach Andy Reid wanted the Chiefs to draft Mahomes.
While on the New Heights podcast in 2022, Mahomes revealed he was given the plays he’d be asked about ahead of a pre-draft meeting with Reid.
“The first day that I met coach Reid was at the facility. We had the meetings, like the top-30 visits so I was in there for like five hours,” Mahomes said on the podcast. “He’s just going through plays and I’m going to give you all the inside scoop. Matt Nagy, who was the offensive coordinator then, he really liked me so he gave me the plays they were gonna go over the night before. So coach Reid is finding out here live on New Heights.”
Nagy was a guest on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast, which was released Wednesday and is hosted by Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his brother, Jason.
Travis Kelce wanted to hear more about Nagy helping Mahomes cheat.
“Yeah, man, fortunately, it ended up working out pretty good,” Nagy said. “Veach and I, we knew how much Veach and coach Reid liked him, and obviously I was in love with him, too. So like, you go into that process, and you guys know that whole deal with the Combine and how it goes, but man, when you’re convicted with somebody and you feel the way that we all did, I don’t know, I guess it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, one of those deals.
“Yeah, I’ll never forget it, because we just sat back and we went through off to the side in the deal, like in between meetings throughout the day. It was the middle of the day. ... Just a little bit of some simple plays, but a few of them (were complex). And we also just said, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got to get one or two wrong here. It can’t be 100% on the test. You’ve got to get like a 95.’”
That made Kelce brothers laugh.
Getting all the questions right certainly would have been suspicious. But Mahomes knocked it out of the park with Reid.
“He killed it in the deal, and I think it stayed pretty quiet for many years, and then I guess he’s the one that busted it out a few years ago,” Nagy said. “Fortunately, it ended up working out.”
What makes Mahomes special
Jason Kelce asked what made Nagy confident that Mahomes would be the right fit for the Chiefs.
Nagy mentioned how Texas Tech’s opponents almost always dropped eight defensive players back into pass coverage but Mahomes was still successful.
“When we watch these players on tape, you know, you sit there and you can’t put the tape down. You just want to keep watching more and more and more,” Nagy said. “And as you’re watching it, you just see the plays that he’s making and these stupid throws. He saw so much drop-eight in college. There was so much drop-eight. So it was like, part of you was like, ‘He’s seeing all this drop-eight, he’s scrambling around.’ And no one’s better than him when he’s outside the pocket, running around. He can make special throws, and he was doing a lot of that.
“So the question was like, ‘OK, what type of person is he? And, what’s his football IQ like, and does he love the game and all that stuff?’ The intangible things, and so, like, as we all started watching more and more tape, coach Reid and Veach and these guys were like, we’ve got to take these quarterbacks, we’ve got to bring them into the room and spend like a good six to eight hours with each of these guys in that draft class.”
Meeting Mahomes only deepened Nagy’s conviction that this was the quarterback for the Chiefs.
“We knew how much we loved the player, but bringing him in and just seeing him take it to the top with the person side of it was unbelievable,” Nagy said of Mahomes. “And like, you could just see he was special, and you didn’t know it until things were gonna happen. But, I mean, my gosh, we were all on board. It was all conviction, and we, I just couldn’t put the film down. He was just special.”