The baffling college career of Patrick Mahomes

The NFL's best quarterback and potential four-time Super Bowl winner wasn't quite an undeniable juggernaut at Texas Tech

The day before I was about to get my first and only live look at the best quarterback I’ve seen in my life, I wrote about a couch.

It was Nov. 2015, I was in my first year on the West Virginia beat at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Mountaineers team I covered was preparing to host Texas Tech. Rather than write about the game itself, I focused on the relationship between the coaches – Dana Holgorsen of West Virginia and Kliff Kingsbury of Texas Tech – and, specifically, how Kingsbury lived Holgorsen’s couch for a bit when the two were assistant coaches at Houston in the late 2000s.

It was a fun story, if only for the mental image of a twenty-something Kingsbury, with his movie-star good looks, crashing with the real-life Ernie McCracken from “Kingpin” who, perhaps more than anyone else in sports, looks like the human embodiment of divorce.

By pursuing that, though, I ultimately ignored something that has proven to be much more significant – the Red Raiders had a sophomore quarterback named Patrick Mahomes.

Texas Tech went on to lose that game 31-26, with Mahomes throwing for just 196 yards and ending up on the losing end of a quarterback battle against the immortal Skyler Howard. With that setback, the Red Raiders fell to 5-5 in a season they’d ultimately finish 7-6.

Mahomes’ college career fascinates me in ways that nobody could have conceived of a decade ago.

Tonight, he and his Kansas City Chiefs team will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX. A victory in that game would give the two-time NFL MVP a fourth Super Bowl, tying Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw for the second-most ever. He’ll have managed to do all of that, somehow, seven months before his 30th birthday. Barring some kind of major injury or unforeseen statistical fall-off, there’s a decent chance he’ll end his professional football career as the greatest quarterback ever.

At Texas Tech, he was something decidedly more mortal and less impressive.

While he displayed undeniable talent, an uncommonly good arm and racked up excellent numbers, his teams were never particularly successful. The Red Raiders went just 13-16 in Mahomes’ 29 career starts, meaning a player who has won 79.5% of his career starts in the NFL won just 44.8% of them in college. By the time he suffered his 16th regular-season loss as a professional, matching his total at Texas Tech, he was in his sixth NFL season, already had an MVP and Super Bowl to his name, and had won 77.1% of his starts.

How did someone who has come to define inevitable excellence in the NFL finish his college career three games under .500 and never play for a team that finished a season with fewer than six losses?

It’s not as much of a mystery as it might seem.

Patrick Mahomes was a good college quarterback

To be clear, Mahomes’ career didn’t follow the same path as newly minted NFL MVP Josh Allen, who failed to make first- or second-team all-Mountain West after completing just 56% of his passes in his final college season at Wyoming.

Beyond his team’s underwhelming win-loss record, Mahomes was an excellent college quarterback.