Texas Tech football: Why Pat Mahomes’ NFL success is bittersweet

As Texas Tech football alum Pat Mahomes continues his magnificent NFL career, his unprecedented success in the NFL is bittersweet for Red Raiders.

This weekend, the greatest Texas Tech football player of the modern era and perhaps all-time, Pat Mahomes, will make his second start in the AFC Championship game in two years as a starter.  But while the rest of the football universe is reveling in the Kansas Chiefs’ QB’s brilliance, you’ll have to excuse us Red Raiders for feeling a bit bittersweet about what the Whitehouse, Texas native has been able to accomplish since leaving Lubbock.

Consider the milestones that the former Red Raider has already set his two years at the helm of the Kansas City offense.  He’s become the fastest player in NFL history to throw for 9,000 yards, and with 16 career 300-yard passing games in his first 25 starts, he broke Hall of Famer Kurt Warner’s record.  We could go on and on about the new milestones he’s set in the NFL but for the purpose of this piece, it is what he didn’t do at Texas Tech that stands out.  He didn’t win.

Of course, the fact that he was just 13-16 as the starting QB for the Red Raiders from 2014-16 was not his fault.  Rather, another beloved son of the program bears the brunt of the blame for the program’s inability to capitalize on the most talented player in program history.

How Kliff Kingsbury didn’t at least manage to get to the postseason in both years that he had Mahomes as his full-time starter is beyond imagination.  What’s more, the fact that the best he was able to do with a future NFL MVP leading his team was a 7-6 season and an appearance in the mid-tier Texas Bowl is inexcusable.

I can remember being a student during the Leach years and discussing with my friends how the Red Raiders needed a transcendent QB, a once-in-a-lifetime talent, to push them to elite status.  After all, Leach had taken the program to a new ritzy zip code in the highest-class neighborhood in the Big 12 with a string of fifth-year seniors at QB.  We could hardly imagine what he would do with a Heisman-caliber player pulling the trigger.

The closest we came during that time was Graham Harrell, who was a fantastic college QB but who never had more of an NFL career than being a backup to Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay.  Still, he was able to take Tech to a No. 2 national ranking in November of 2008 because Leach had built a complete team to surround him.

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It’s maddening that by the time Tech actually had the best QB in the nation, it also had the worst defense in the nation.  Isn’t it fun being a Texas Tech football fan?

We didn’t need Kingsbury to field a defense at the level of Alabama, Clemson, or Ohio State during those years.  We just needed him to put together one that was comparable to those produced by Oregon State, North Carolina, Illinois, or Maryland.  All of those schools had defenses that ranked in the 60s or 70s nationally in 2016, more than good enough for Tech to field an 8 or 9-win team with Mahomes and the offense putting up video game numbers.

Also, that was the absolutely perfect year for Tech to ride a prolific offense and a merely adequate defense to a strong season.  That’s because, in the last year of Mahomes’ tenure in Lubbock, the Big 12 was devoid of an elite team.

No Big 12 team was included in the 4-team college football playoff nor did the Big 12 participate in any of the New Years’ Six bowl games that season.  The 2016 conference champion, Oklahoma, was just 11-2 overall, 10-2 in the regular season.  It was the only time since 2010 that the Big 12 champ lost two games in the regular season.

What’s more, Tech was able to push that year’s OU team to the brink in Lubbock in the unforgettable 66-59 shootout in Lubbock.  In other words, Tech was just a mediocre defense away from challenging for a conference crown that season and handing the eventual conference champ its only Big 12 loss.

What’s more, the 2016 OU defense was just No. 82 in the nation, proving what even a bottom-half of the nation defense could accomplish that season.  But that was far better than No. 128, where Tech finished the year.

In the six conference games Tech lost in Mahome’s junior year, only twice did the offense fail to put up at least 38 points.  Considering that West Virginia and Oklahoma State finished tied for second in the league that year with 7-2 conference records, Tech could have still dropped those two offensive no-shows and tied for second in the conference.  Imagine how different the Kingsbury era and the current state of the program would have been had that happened.

In all, Mahomes and the offense put up an average of 37 points per game in the 15 losses the team endured during his career when he started and finished a game.  That scoring average from just Tech’s losses would have ranked 23rd in the nation in 2016 and 21st in 2015.

Last week, Mahomes and his offense had to pull the Chiefs out of a 24-0 hole against the Houston Texans, who built their lead thanks to special teams miscues, defensive lapses, and turnovers by Kansas City that Mahomes had no part in.  It was reminiscent of his time as a Red Raider.

During his career in Lubbock, he lost six games in which his offense topped the 40-point mark and five games in which Tech put 50 or more points on the board.  In three years as a starter, Graham Harrell lost only two games in which his offense put up 40 points.

So every time I see Pat Mahomes do something else that is beyond belief in a Kansas City uniform, every time he makes a no-look pass, breaks another record or leads his team to an improbable comeback, I am happy for him but my frustration with the Texas Tech football program grows. Sure, seeing him succeed in the NFL is nice for our school but it will never carry as much weight as actually putting him in a place to do in college what he’s doing in the NFL would have done for the good ole Double-T.