[RunKC]

Elway is ****ed and he knows it. What a time to be alive

I'M STANDING WITH John Elway as we watch Mahomes warm up at Arrowhead Stadium before the Chiefs play the Broncos in late October. Mahomes rolls left and throws deep right, then rolls right and throws deep left. He tosses it 60 yards without a strain or grunt. He looks like he's goofing around -- even checks his phone between reps -- but this is actual practice. In games, he makes those throws. A few Broncos coaches watch Mahomes, seduced by the spectacle of it all. He has skills at his command that are the envy of anyone who's ever played quarterback, and if you've ever thrown a ball well enough to have an idea of how hard it is to don what he does, it's even more fascinating and thrilling and full of lovely subtleties, like the angle at which the nose rises and falls, how the ball seems to gain speed with distance rather than lose it, violent yet catchable. These passes change more than a game's momentum. They suspend time, forcing you to look up from your phone and making you wonder what it feels like to unleash such force. Elway knows.

I ask Elway, "When your arm was its strongest, what was it like to throw?"

"I don't know," he says. He chews on it for a second and gives me a football version of the "I could always just play" scene in "Good Will Hunting." "You just feel like you can do anything."

To succeed in the NFL, most players have to come to terms with their limits. You learn to work within and against them. But if you are born with an arm like Mahomes' or Elway's, it allows you the blessing of never having to reconsider yourself -- unless, of course, a few painful postseason losses force you to reconsider everything.