Patrick Mahomes being a top-10 pick is another sign that the NFL’s changing

The offense Patrick Mahomes played in at Texas Tech for three seasons is worlds different than NFL offenses have historically been.

Texas Tech runs the air raid, a spread scheme that emphasizes shotgun snaps, wide splits between linemen and receivers, and tons of passing to areas all over the field. Last season, Mahomes threw 591 passes in 12 games, the third-highest total in college football. The only QBs to throw more were at Washington State and California, two of the sport’s other air raid teams. Drew Brees threw 42 times per game to lead the NFL; Mahomes threw 49 times per game in the Big 12, on about 60 percent of his plays.

Air raid quarterbacks have yet to make a mark in the NFL, since the scheme’s emergence around the turn of the century. Some examples:

These QBs have been stigmatized as college wonders, and many haven’t gotten prolonged NFL chances. There’s now evidence that NFL teams aren’t viewing them as a great risk, and Mahomes is the latest data point.

Last year, the Rams made Goff the first overall pick. This year, Mahomes wasn’t supposed to be any higher than the third QB taken, but the Chiefs traded up to grab him, taking him with national title Clemson QB Deshaun Watson still on the board.

Hal Mumme is the father of the air raid offense. He developed it over the 1980s and 1990, when his career took him from Copperas Cove High School in Texas to the head coaching job at Kentucky. (He was Couch’s coach there in 1998, when Couch was a Heisman Trophy finalist.)

Mumme built the air raid on concepts run by former BYU coach LaVell Edwards. One goal was to spread the field so much, to make defenses so profoundly uncomfortable, that it would mitigate the talent gap between Mumme’s teams and the opposition.

Maybe that contributed to a notion of the air raid as a gimmicky offense whose players couldn’t succeed in the pros. But NFL offenses have opened up considerably in the past five years, and now there’s less difference between a regular NFL offense and a college spread. Lots of teams line up with three and four receivers, running option routes over the middle and streaks down the sidelines. Shotgun snaps have never been more popular.

”It’s always been a slow reaction to what the college guys were doing,” Mumme — whose associate, Mike Leach, mentored TTU coach and former Patriots backup Kliff Kingsbury — recently told SB Nation. “For instance, back in the ‘60s, the NFL only had two coverages. They just played man, or they played cover 3. And then they hired a bunch of college coaches to come in and coach secondaries, and they started playing cover 2 and two deep safeties instead of one deep safety all the time.

“They’ve always stolen a lot of ideas. A lot of college coaches have gravitated toward going to that level, and they take the ideas with ‘em.”

Andy Reid’s been a professional coach for decades — he was also a grad assistant under BYU’s Edwards and chose two air raid-ish QBs, Nick Foles and Kevin Kolb, in Philly — but the point remains. The kind of ship Mahomes captained at Texas Tech is probably what he’ll eventually do in Kansas City, albeit with fewer attempts. It’s unlikely that Mahomes is asked to take many under-center snaps and then drop back seven steps while reading defenses for long periods of time.

If the Colts had drafted Andrew Luck and asked him to run the inverted veer option, he probably wouldn’t have had much success. If the Falcons of the early 2000s had asked Michael Vick to be a statue, he wouldn’t have been good or fun. NFL teams have been tailoring offenses around quarterbacks for generations now.

It’s probably been a slower adaptation for QBs of pass-first spread offenses. Offenses of the past have been run-heavy, with lots of linemen and few receivers. But evidence has mounted in recent years that NFL teams don’t mind investing in quarterbacks from different backgrounds, and now Mahomes will get his chance.