“I wasn’t ready”: When Patrick Mahomes recounted feeling unprepared during first appearance as starting QB for Texas Tech in 2014

Patrick Mahomes has become a household name for football fans. But before he became a three-time Super Bowl MVP and one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time, Mahomes also had to go through his share of struggles at the college level.

We look back at the time a young Patrick Mahomes admitted he wasn’t ready to play in a college football game for the Texas Tech Red Raiders in a 2015 interview with KFYO. He recounted feeling unprepared during his first career appearance as a starting QB against Oklahoma State in 2014.

“At the beginning, you could tell that at the Oklahoma State game, I wasn’t ready to be in there. I didn’t work hard enough. But after I saw that, that kind of changed my mentality and as the year went on, I tried to improve more and more, and it’s just something I’ve been trying to do all offseason, just keep getting better and trying to be the best quarterback that I can be,” Patrick Mahomes said.

It’s fair to say the former Texas Tech quarterback improved his game preparation. Mahomes finished his college career with 11,252 yards, 93 touchdowns and 29 interceptions in three years with the Red Raiders, the last two as the starter.

While Patrick Mahomes had a solid college career, he wasn’t considered a possible pick at the top of the 2017 NFL Draft. In fact, the Chicago Bears drafted Mitch Trubisky with the second overall pick while the Texas Tech product would go tenth to the Kansas City Chiefs. The rest is history.

Patrick Mahomes had to battle for the starting job since seventh grade

Patrick Mahomes also had to battle to get on the field before making it to the NFL. The Tyler, Texas native had to endure position battles from seventh grade until junior high. Ironically, his position battles would be against his best friend, Ryan Cheatham.

“All the way from seventh grade till junior high school I was competing against my best friend -and he’s still my best friend-. He played quarterback too and I always say that (if) he would have played anywhere else in the state and he’d be the starting quarterback, he’d probably be playing D-1 football right now,” Mahomes said.

The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback also sat behind Davis Webb in his freshman year at Lubbock. Webb would miss four games that season, allowing the freshman to play. Mahomes would win the starting job ahead of his sophomore season.

A similar story would play out in the NFL, where Alex Smith held the starting job in Mahomes rookie season before making the change at QB in Patrick's second season in the NFL.