Sean Payton pays an absurd compliment to Patrick Mahomes

Sean Payton was in on Patrick Mahomes heading into the 2017 draft, and he may still be a little sour that the Chiefs usurped the Saints to get him.

As Patrick Mahomes prepares to play in his second straight Super Bowl, the teams that passed on him in the 2017 NFL Draft can continue lamenting a missed opportunity. There was no denying his raw tools, but to say there were no questions about how good he could be is wrong.

In the first round of that draft, the New Orleans Saints had the 11th overall pick after a 7-9 campaign in 2016. The Kansas City Chiefs traded from No. 27 all the way to No. 10 with the Buffalo Bills, giving up their 2018 first-round pick in the deal.

Saints head coach Sean Payton spoke to NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football” Wednesday morning. He called Mahomes “the best college quarterback I’ve ever evaluated”, and he still can’t hide his dismay that the Chiefs traded to the pick above the Saints to get him.

Sean Payton has absurd praise for Patrick Mahomes

As the Saints now fully face replacing a retired Drew Brees this offseason, drafting Mahomes would have upped the succession timeline for a future Hall of Famer. The Chiefs were merely looking to upgrade from Alex Smith. They bet on Mahomes’ upside, and he sat out most of his rookie season behind Smith before hitting the ground running. Payton is now left to prop up Jameis Winston as a candidate to be the Saints’ next quarterback.

The nine teams that didn’t take him before the Chiefs moved up to do it will always lament a missed opportunity to draft Mahomes, and the Saints sat at No. 11 covertly hoping he’d get to them. Payton’s compliment is easy to offer in hindsight, but in the moment of the 2017 pre-draft process it would have been counted as pretty absurd.