Superstar of the NFL: How Patrick Mahomes changed American football

Dhe movement came out of nowhere. And she amazed everyone who saw her. Hardly anyone knew what effects all of this was going to have this year and in the years that followed. And why, after all, it seemed hard to imagine.

Patrick Mahomes, just turned 19, was standing on a football field with Texas Tech University’s name on his jersey and he was throwing the ball; out of the run, with your arm bent to the side, very different from what is actually written in all football textbooks.

Nevertheless, he threw the ball with full force, as fast as an arrow and precisely, tilting his wrist at the last moment created the necessary spin, the lateral arm position enabled a trajectory past all the arms of all defenders to the target, his teammate. An impossible throw from an impossible position at an impossible angle. For young Patrick Mahomes: no problem.

Mahomes wins the Super Bowl

Back then, in 2014, Brett Veach was in the stands. And Brett Veach marveled. As a scout for the Kansas City Chiefs, a National Football League (NFL) team, he was supposed to be watching another player. But he just couldn’t take his eyes off Patrick Mahomes, this young quarterback who played so differently than everyone else, which also made mistakes, of course, but also the impossible possible. A diamond in the rough.

Brett Veach convinced those responsible in Kansas City, who chose Patrick Mahomes in the NFL draft in tenth place. The rest is history. The title: Super Bowl win 2020. The team: from decades-unsuccessful contender to now annual favorite. The game: fundamentally changed.

Daniel Jensen and Alex von Kuczkowski wrote a book about it. About how Patrick Mahomes grew from the son of a baseball star to an outstanding athlete himself, how Patrick Mahomes made the decision between a football career and a baseball career (not to mention the basketball career that was also on the horizon) at the very last moment, and more , where all that incredible ambition and team spirit comes from that has made Patrick Mahomes successful on the field and the popular and respected leader of a squad of 53 tough guys in the dressing room.

“Patrick Mahomes. The Incredible Story of the NFL Superstar” describes how a boy from Texas became a full professional who may not have invented this special way of throwing the football, but combined it with his throwing hardness and a chutzpah almost unique in the NFL to such an extreme that it has evolved the art of the game in the NFL, the way quarterbacks are trained, how they think, how they act. How Patrick Mahomes, now 27, has become a role model for new generations of football players.

Subtle, but with one flaw

The authors, former journalists but now active elsewhere in the football media industry, tell Patrick Mahomes’ story in a profound yet emotional way. Written simply, with a personal touch, by fans for a wide audience. Anticlimactically, starting from the great triumph, back into the great past to end with the present: Patrick Mahomes is still on the field for the Kansas City Chiefs, this Sunday (10:25 p.m. CEST on ProSieben) it is against the San Francisco 49ers for the fifth win in seven games.

You learn a lot of interesting things, as well as a lot of trivial things, and yet in the end you have the impression that you know pretty much everything about the life of this football diamond, who has long since taken shape and shimmers like few others in the NFL.

However, the authors make a serious mistake: they describe Patrick Mahomes as “the highest-paid athlete in the world”. Multiple. A statement that is simply not true. Nonetheless, it features prominently on the back cover and elsewhere in the book. That the authors partially qualify this claim in at least two places in the text? It was given as a gift, because apparently it didn’t get through to the publisher’s marketing department.

Patrick Mahomes’ alleged record contract is linked to a number of (success-related) conditions. Only a sum of 141.5 million dollars (144 million euros) is guaranteed. Enough for ten years of football, you might think. But others earn more. In order to get the record sum of half a billion dollars in Kansas City, which is meant by the “record contract”, he would have to make it to the Super Bowl with the Chiefs every year, among other things. Even someone like Patrick Mahomes can’t do that.