Before the Bag: Patrick Mahomes, 2016 Texas Tech

He threw for 734 yards and lost. Before NIL, that game was worth exactly nothing.

Before the Bag is a weekly look back at a college football legend from before NIL existed; and an opinion-based estimate of what they’d actually be worth if they played today.

The Player, The Moment

On October 22, 2016, Patrick Mahomes threw for 734 yards and ran for 85 more against Oklahoma; 819 total yards, an FBS record that still stands. He did it on 88 pass attempts, one shy of the all-time record, completing 52 of them for five touchdowns and adding two more scores on the ground. Texas Tech and Oklahoma combined for 1,708 yards of total offense that night, still the most in any Big 12 game ever played. Mahomes lost. Oklahoma won 66-59.

That game is the headline, but it wasn’t a one-off. Mahomes led the entire nation in total offense as a junior in 2016, throwing for 5,052 yards. He closed his college career with 586 yards and six touchdowns in his final game. He did it all as a three-sport athlete out of high school who was also drafted by the Detroit Tigers as a baseball pitcher. And he did it all on a Texas Tech team that finished the 2016 season 5-7; no bowl game, no signature win, nothing but the numbers themselves to point to.

There was no NIL in 2016. The single most jaw-dropping statistical season in recent college football history produced zero off-field income for the player who authored it, largely because the team around him didn’t win enough games to make anyone outside Lubbock pay attention while it was happening.

So what would that season be worth today, when a highlight reel travels a lot further than a win-loss record does? I built an estimate.