Podcast: Remembering the first time Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield squared off
Before I came to The Star in July to cover the Chiefs, I spent two years chasing the Oklahoma Sooners and Baker Mayfield for The Oklahoman.
With the Chiefs visiting Mayfield and the Browns in Cleveland this weekend, I’m tapping into my Big 12 background and revisiting the first time quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Mayfield squared off in a wild game two years ago.
On Oct. 22, 2016, Mayfield and Mahomes put on a four-hour-and-10-minute offensive spectacle in Lubbock, Texas, shattering records and the will of the defenses.
In advance of Sunday’s Chiefs-Browns game in Cleveland, I called up my Oklahoman colleagues from that game — OU reporter Ryan Aber and columnist Berry Tramel — for a podcast. We discussed the Mahomes-Mayfield game and previewed the rematch.
My initial assignment was to take the temperature of the Texas Tech crowd and to gauge their feelings about Mayfield’s return to the place where he started his collegiate career. As I wandered around tailgates outside of the stadium, I found most folks were pretty ‘meh’ about his return. Nobody that I talked to at that point had really strong opinions. After all, the Red Raiders had Mahomes, and he was doing a pretty, pretty good job.
That storyline became secondary to what happened on the field that night, when Oklahoma came out on top 66-59 and the two teams each put up 854 yards, setting an NCAA record with a combined 1,708 yards of total offense.
By himself, Mahomes ran 100 plays. He threw the ball 88 times — for a whopping 734 yards and five touchdowns — and carried it 12.
“You have your script and you start looking at it, and you’re like, I’ve called everything on it,” Red Raiders coach Kliff Kingsbury told me. “It was one of those games that sometimes things just work. Sometimes they don’t and sometimes they do, but every play seemed to work. Or Pat was making it work, I should say.
“We were scrambling, looking at both sides of the sheet, looking at two-minute plays, stuff that we could call. It was one of those games where he was going to make you right no matter what you called. He was going to make it work. We were just calling some of our base offenses and Pat was doing the rest.”
Meanwhile, Mayfield was performing a little magic of his own. As the crowd grew more hostile toward their former quarterback late in the game — and the beat writers scrambled to turn something in by deadline — Mayfield dazzled with 545 passing yards and a school-record seven touchdowns.
At halftime, OU led 30-24. The Sooners got a stop to open the third quarter, but that would be the last stop for either team for the rest of the game. The two teams combined for 10 straight touchdowns to close the game. 10. Seriously.
“I’ve seen a lot of great offensive performances over the years and the way those two quarterbacks and those two offenses played that night, they would’ve scored on anybody and everybody,” said OU coach Lincoln Riley, who was the Sooners’ offensive coordinator that night. “I realized after the game, that doesn’t happen every day. Rarely do you see one guy or group play like that. To have two do it on the same night with all the other storylines, it’s really under appreciated in my opinion. It was a great college football game.
“The people there that saw it, they ought to consider themselves lucky because chances are they’ll never see anything like it again.”
Sunday, they’ll take the field in Cleveland for round two of what could end up being a quarterback rivalry that morphs into the next Brady-Manning or Marino-Montana. This time, of course, they’ll be surrounded by a different cast of characters and wearing NFL uniforms.
We probably won’t see anything like that 2016 game this time around, but to understand the significance of these two squaring off again, it’s worth taking a look back at what happened in that first meeting between two under-recruited Texas high school quarterbacks-turned-Big 12 starters and future top-10 NFL draft picks.
I’ll admit, that night was a blur for me. It was a 7 p.m. kickoff and deadlines were tight.
Where my memory starts to vividly come back is the postgame. After the game FINALLY finished after 11, I had a short window to get quotes and turn in my game story. I rushed down to the small converted closet where OU was holding its postgame press conference. The moods of the two sides of the ball couldn’t have been more different. Where Mayfield and Riley were thrilled — Riley called the offensive performance the team’s most complete to that point — defensive coordinator Mike Stoops and the defensive players existed in a state of disbelief and anger. Stoops came to the podium looking fully disheveled. Some of that, I’m sure, was a product of a quick shower and wardrobe change, but he sounded like a man defeated.
The defensive players we talked to were angry that they let that happen. One player, outside linebacker Ogbo Okoronkwo was taken out of the locker room on a stretcher. As it turned out, he was severely dehydrated and exhausted — and he wouldn’t be the last defensive player to have that feeling after facing Mahomes.
Under the deadline crunch, I balanced my laptop on top of a short utility closet and typed out the quotes as they were being said.
To make up for my shortcomings of in-game reflections and fill in other details, I called up my old colleagues. Together, we dove head first into nostalgia.
Brooke Pryor
Brooke Pryor covers the Kansas City Chiefs and NFL for The Star.
This story was originally published October 31, 2018 at 2:30 PM with the headline "Podcast: Remembering the first time Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield squared off."