The Texas Tech product is at least the first QB drafted out of a Big 12 school to go down as the winning QB in an NFL playoff game.
This is an astonishing thing to read, so much so that I didn’t believe it when I saw it come across my Twitter timeline Saturday evening:
Patrick Mahomes is the 1st Big 12 quarterback to ever win a playoff game
— Cody Tapp (@codybtapp) January 13, 2019
Could that really be true? I thought to myself. I immediately tried to debunk it. But every time I tried, I could not, because it’s an honest-to-goodness real fact.
No QB drafted from a Big 12 school had ever won an NFL playoff game until Texas Tech’s Mahomes led the Chiefs past the Colts in the AFC Divisional round.
The Big 12 has only been the Big 12 since 1996.
Before that, most of its longtime members played in the Big-8. That league produced at least a few QBs who went on to win NFL playoff games. Colorado’s Kordell Stewart was one, but his last season in Boulder was 1994, a few seasons before CU became a Big 12 thing. The same kind of thing’s true of West Virginia’s Marc Bulger, later a Rams playoff QB.
Oklahoma’s Troy Aikman, who transferred to UCLA before turning pro, was another, but it’s fine if you’d rather not count Aikman as an OU quarterback anyway.
Since the advent of the Big 12, it’s possible there’s been a transfer QB somewhere who’s left the conference, then got drafted out of a non-Big 12 school and went on to playoff success. (If you can think of one, let us know. I cannot, based on a quick surveying of NFL playoff years.) But either way, a Big 12 team had never had a QB drafted after finishing his career in the Big 12 who’d gone on to win a playoff game, before Mahomes did it in 2019.
This is the full list of 25 QBs drafted out of the Big 12 since it became the Big 12, via Sports Reference. Mahomes is one of seven top-10 picks on that list, but none of the others has any playoff wins to his name. Sam Bradford, Vince Young, Ryan Tannehill (who left Texas A&M before its move to the SEC), Blaine Gabbert (ditto, but with Missouri), Robert Griffin III, and Baker Mayfield have a combined no playoff wins between them, for various reasons.
The Bengals’ Andy Dalton would count if TCU had joined the Big 12 a few years earlier, and also if Dalton were not 0-4 in his playoff career.
However, if you want to get cute about this (and I definitely do, because otherwise, what’s the fun?), you can point out that at least two other Big 12 QBs have participated in playoff wins.
One is Seneca Wallace, the former Iowa State QB who became an NFL receiver and participated in Seahawks playoff wins after the 2005 and 2006 seasons. He didn’t throw a pass in any such games, and he wasn’t close to being the winning QB, but you could fairly point out that he won an NFL playoff game and also was a Big 12 QB.
Another is Koy Detmer, formerly of Colorado. Detmer even threw a 3-yard completion in a 2005 Eagles playoff win over the Falcons.
Also if you want to get cute: Mahomes’ college coach was on injured reserve for a Super Bowl team, though he never won a playoff game.
That’s Kliff Kingsbury, a backup for the 2003 Patriots and the former Texas Tech QB and head coach who’s now taking over the Cardinals.
But, yeah.
That Mahomes is the first Big 12 QB to ever win a playoff game sounds far too outrageous to be true when you first read it, or at least it did for me. But it’s not wrong.