Nerf guns, Frisbees and trash talk. Here’s a look inside Chiefs quarterback room

Earlier this year, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes contacted toy manufacturer Hasbro with a request: He needed a Nerf baseball bat.

Mahomes intended to use it for games with his fellow quarterbacks, but there was one problem.

“I asked Nerf to give me a bat so we could hit, and they sent me like 100 Nerf guns,” Mahomes said last month at the SiriusXM Town Hall from Chiefs training camp . “So we do Nerf-gun shooting competitions in the room.”

The room Mahomes referenced is the Chiefs quarterback room, which doesn’t refer to a specific space at the team’s practice facility. It’s a term used to describe the time quarterbacks spend together.

Mahomes once shared that room with Alex Smith, who returned to St. Joseph in his role as a SiriusXM host. The two pulled back the veil on what happens when quarterbacks gather to watch film, study plays and prepare for the next opponent.

It’s not all work and no play.

“Alex used to make us do conditioning games, but he would make them games, like legit games,” Mahomes said.

It involved throwing a Frisbee as a pass to a quarterback partner with the aim of moving down the field and ultimately hitting the crossbar on the field goal.

“If the Frisbee landed on the ground, you had to go back (to the start) and run again,” Mahomes recalled. “So you’d throw and your partner had to run and go catch it. And it was a contest back and forth down the field. And, you know, we’re competitors, so all of a sudden, we probably ran like 800 yards before we realized we were sweating for no reason in the middle of the day.”

That wasn’t the only contest Smith had them play. In Mahomes’ rookie season, the Chiefs quarterbacks were Smith, Tyler Bray, Joel Stave and Mahomes.

Once a week, those signal-callers would switch sports.

“Every Thursday night, after you were done watching film, we’d watch the red zone on Thursday night, and we’d go do the QB dinner,” Smith recalled. “There was the hoop, and we’d walk down and you would play the game of CHIEFS, not HORSE. It’s HORSE, but with CHIEFS. And these guys all played basketball, like the whole QB room, and all these guys played basketball, I didn’t. I was more of the hustle guy on the basketball court, like a rebounder.

“We had to play trick shots, though, because I wouldn’t let them shoot regularly. ... I’m gonna get beat. So we did, like, trick shot CHIEFS.”

Mahomes added: “He knew every angle of every wall in that locker room.”

‘Heavy on the trash talk’

Quarterbacks deal with an ever-changing amount of information. They spend a week learning a bunch of new plays as Andy Reid and the coaching staff roll out a new game plan each week.

Once the game is over, the quarterbacks have to forget all those plays and start studying up on a new plan of action for the next opponent in less than a week’s time.

Regardless of their place on the Chiefs depth chart, the quarterbacks help one another but they also are quick with a joke.

“It is heavy on the trash talk,” Smith said. “You can’t be sensitive on the QB text chain. A lot of banter.”

You can’t be sensitive because those quarterbacks are constantly with one another. When he joined the Chiefs in 2013, Smith shared the room with Chase Daniel, the former Mizzou star.

Smith quipped that Daniel was extremely annoying at first, but now they’re great friends.

“You do everything together,” Smith said. “The quarterback text chain, it’s, ‘What time are we working out tomorrow? What time are we going to treatment?’ We’re watching film together. We’re prepping together, and the backup’s getting ready to play. And he’s also a sounding board for you, right? He’s also out on the practice field, and he’s trying to make every throw he can because he might have to play. And it pushes you. And it’s this great culture.

“So when Patrick stepped into it, he didn’t skip a beat. In fact, he beat me in most mornings. He was in there studying his plays and getting ready. And Patrick was gonna be successful no matter where he went, is the truth. And I think the setup, though, here with Andy and the quarterback room only made it quicker.”

Mahomes has now supplanted Smith as the leader of the quarterback room, but the vibe remains the same. Quarterbacks Mahomes, Carson Wentz and Bailey Zappe work and play hard.

And they give each other grief.

“It’s like we all love each other, we’re all brothers. We love each other, but we’re going to talk trash,” Mahomes said. “At the end of the day, everybody’s going to talk trash. You’ve got to take it. You’ve got to be able to give it everything like that. But we root for each other. I think that’s the big thing, it’s a close-knit group.

“Carson (Wentz), it’s been awesome to get Carson in here and kind of break him out of that shell, because he’s a guy who loves football and works extremely hard, but I don’t think he understood all the different noises we make. ... Like you make a throw and like, ‘Oh, great throw, you didn’t want throw that deep one?’ A little jab every time. I think it’s gonna be awesome. He’s super talented. And I think that year here is gonna have to give him a chance to get a starting spot somewhere.”

A support system

While the quarterbacks enjoy clowning around at times, Mahomes said the bottom line is they’re trying to help each other become better players.

“We push each other to be great,” Mahomes told reporters at a news conference in the preseason. “We want that QB room, no matter who steps in, to be able to go out there and have success. And I think you’ve seen that over the years with Chad (Henne). You’ve seen it with Matt Moore. And now you see with Shane (Buechele) he’s getting better and better every single year. ...

“We try to take pride in that QB room that no matter who steps in the game, there’s no drop off and that we can all go out there and have success. And so I’m proud of all those guys.”