Bill Simmons Compared Patrick Mahomes to Steph Curry
Source - The Ringer’s Bill Simmons offered up the kind of take that makes you go “hmmm.”
“Patrick Mahomes is Steph Curry for football,” Simmons said on ESPN’s “Jalen & Jacoby.” …
“So, (he) comes into the league right as its changing, right? So, Steph Curry comes into the league right as people start getting the spacing, 3-point shooting — all this stuff.”
“And he’s the best shooter we’ve ever but also the timing of the shooting. He’s at the forefront of this new revolution.”
“Mahomes comes in right as the rules have changed and football’s turning into touch football. You can’t touch the quarterback. You can’t hold receivers over the middle. We’re having more 400-yard games (than) ever. It’s just, it’s touch football.”
“He is the best flag football quarterback you could ever possibly have. He can run. He’s got a cannon. You’re not allowed to hit him.”
I get it. We live in a High School Yearbook Superlatives world, where everybody and everything has to be talked about as the most, the best, the extremest, the GOATiest. It’s how the media game is played. So even though I need tongs to handle The Sports Guy’s Guatemalan Insanity Pepper-temperature take, I’m not going to reach for the low-hanging fruit of him comparing a first year starter to a guy who’s won three titles, two MVPs, a scoring title and led the league in steals. It’s too easy and besides, I don’t think that’s what Simmons was going for.
My beef is more with his underlying premise. That Patrick Mahomes is somehow this fresh, new, never-before-seen, reinvention of the quarterback wheel. Far from it.
You know what Patrick Mahomes is so far? Impressive AF. In a short sample, he in the top five in the league in every statistic. He leads in touchdown passes, with 14. My personal religious beliefs preac pashser rating over QBR, but he’s fifth in PR and is tops in the league in QBR, so either way he’s good. He’s only thrown two picks. And at 23 years old looks like he has a solid grasp of Andy Reid’s controlled passing offense. It’s all good.
But this business of talking about him like he’s the next step in human quarterbacking evolution is exactly the kind of shit we hear every time a reasonably mobile QB comes into the league. Working backwards, you could put together an unbroken string of quarterbacks who were expected to revolutionize how the position would be played. From Mahomes to Colin Kaepernick to Robert Griffin III to Cam Newton … all the way back to Steve Young and Randall Cunningham and probably Fran Tarkenton for all I know. Hell, Newton had 4,000 passing yards as a rookie, without the benefit of even having a full training camp, never mind sitting for a year behind Alex Smith like Mahomes did. So by now, saying that Mahomes is somehow the future is like going on an EPCOT ride they haven’t updated in 30 years where they say by the year 2020 we’ll be living in domes on the ocean floor or something.
The second part of the argument is just as common and every bit as flawed. That the rules have finally and suddenly gone too far and turned the NFL into flag football. Like this is something new. The rules on not being able to touch receivers were designed to stop Mel Blount of the Steelers back in the early ’80s. They were >ahem< emphasized after the Patriots physically overpowered the Colts receivers in the 2003 playoffs. The rules to protect quarterbacks began decades ago, outlawed touching their heads, banned diving at their legs after Carson Palmer went down in 2006 and just added the rule where you can’t drop your weight on them this year. So in order to for a guy like Mahomes to be riding the crest of some new wave of rules designed to protect him, he’d have had to been drafted a long time ago. And the things we’re hearing now about all the 400 yard games are exactly what Dan Marino heard when he cracked 5,000 yards in 1984, Dan Fouts (4,802) heard in 1981 and Neil fricking Lomax (4,614) heard in ’84.
So let’s just slow our roll on claiming Mahomes is anything other than what he is: A promising first-year starter who looks good so far running the league’s currently second most productive offense. Which – again, so far – looks remarkably similar to Andy Reid’s offense last year that started scored 33 points per game through five games and dropped to 18 per game over the next six. And let’s stop the hyperbole train, because the world is lousy with mediocre and failed QBs who at one point or another were called The Next Big Thing.