Super Bowl 2025: Hempstead's Tim Terry has come around on Patrick Mahomes, and then some
Tim Terry is the director of pro personnel for Kansas City. Credit: Kansas City Chiefs
NEW ORLEANS — Tim Terry, the man with the most trusted eye in Kansas City, had no idea what he was looking at when he was first hired by the team in May 2017.
That was about a month after KC drafted Patrick Mahomes. The rookie wasn’t playing in games yet — Alex Smith was the starter for the majority of that season — but he was out spinning darts and ripping the ball into tight windows all over the practice fields.
“Brett Veach [the general manager of the team] and the guys, they kept rewinding the tape saying, ‘Look at this throw! Look at this one!’ ” Terry recalled of their excitement.
But Terry? Meh.
“I was like, ‘That’s just normal,’ ” he said.
That’s because Terry had spent the first 13 years of his front-office career in Green Bay watching Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers carve up defenses with Hall of Fame arms and insights.
“I took it for granted because that’s all I knew,” Terry said.
Kansas City forgave him for his lack of enthusiasm. Since that first slight miscalculation, he’s more than proved himself to be a valuable part of the team’s ascent to the top of the NFL, as well as its ability to remain there.
Terry — who grew up in Hempstead, played college ball for Temple and had a few seasons bouncing between the NFL and CFL before making the move to evaluation — is Kansas City’s director of player personnel and pro scouting. After winning one Super Bowl during his time in Green Bay and three others since arriving in Kansas City, he hopes the team he helped assemble can win him a fifth on Sunday against the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.
You won’t see or hear Terry’s name much when the architects of this dynasty are mentioned, but he has left a big imprint on the consistency of the team.
“Tim is a good one,” coach Andy Reid said. “He knows everybody in the league and they all respect him and give him an honest answer. That’s important.”
“Every free agent who comes through that door, Tim Terry is the man who says to all of us, ‘Coach, I think this boy right here can help us,’ ” Kansas City defensive backs coach Dave Merritt said. “And he’s right a lot of the time. He’s probably batting .900 right now.”
Terry, 50, played a big role in the acquisition of wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins from the Titans about two weeks before this season’s trade deadline. It wasn’t necessarily his genius that led to the swap — it was a no-brainer throughout the organization — but Terry had done work on Hopkins when he was a free agent several years earlier. A deal was not made at that point, but the conversations back then told Terry and his department that Hopkins would be a good fit for their organization.
“Having communication with those guys, they knew I wanted to come to [Kansas City],” Hopkins said.
“You don’t do every deal,” Terry said of the free-agency flirtation. “But you inquire to see what the reality is . . . I wish it would have happened a couple years ago when we were trying to get him, but I’m glad it worked out well.”
Terry said the thrill of finding a player who can fit the way Hopkins did never gets old.
Nor, he said, does being at the Super Bowl.
His collection of four rings sits at home and he trots them out for company who might want a glimpse. Each of them, he said, tells a different story, and when he does pick them up, he is reminded of each season’s narrative.
The pressure is on for this fifth one, though, in a way that none of the others carried.
“I keep joking that I’m going to give one to each of my kids,” he said. “I have five kids [Zoe, Tim, Jayden, Tyson and Reese], so I need to get one more.”
And of course he has come around on Mahomes’ greatness, too, after the initial whiff.
“Was that going to equate to MVPs and the records and potentially being a three-time-straight Super Bowl champion? No one could say that,” Terry said of Mahomes’ early signs of success. “But the work he put in, plus his ability, it’s been a good mesh.”
That and the talent with which Terry keeps Mahomes surrounded could have the quarterback in the conversation for something Terry never guessed that kid on the practice fields would become: the greatest ever.
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