How the Chiefs coached “wild horse rider” Patrick Mahomes

The Chicago Bears introduced former Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy as their new head coach this week and the Chicago media is busy talking to folks familiar with Nagy to learn more about him.

One of those people is Brad Childress, who is retiring. The now former Chiefs assistant coach was asked on ESPN 1000 in Chicago what Nagy learned about young quarterbacks from coaching Patrick Mahomes last year.

“First of all, Pat is able to learn from the wisdom just sitting in the room,” Childress said. “You don’t coach to Patrick, you coach to Alex and then you work with Patrick on the side after practice during scout team. He’s learning every step of the way as he’s watching a guy like Alex prepare.

“Pat is a little bit of a wild horse rider. Never took a snap underneath center his whole college career. You don’t ever think about the center-quarterback exchange until the ball is on the ground and you’re chasing it around. If you’ve ever been at the Senior Bowl, you’ve seen what that looks like when they run their first inside drill. You see that go on the ground. That’s something, the center could change, he could be blocking back, going out the other way, those are things that you have to master at that position. You think, wait a minute, shouldn’t you have mastered that in little league football? But where we’re at in college fotoball everyone is playing out of the shotgun so for us to get Pat in that situation where he can play from under center — obviously he’s more comfortable in the shotgun — it took 16 games. It took that much time to be able to do that.

“Then he was able to put his wears on the field against Denver in the last game of the year against a pretty good defense that was still playing a lot of their starters.”

One, I love how the Chiefs always point out that the Broncos had a lot of their starters in the game (for at least part of the game).

Second, that’s really interesting about how they teach the quarterbacks. There was another mention in the interview about last year’s Hard Knocks with Jared Goff and Childress said you don’t MF (you can guess that that means) the quarterback like that.

Check out the whole interview here.