Backup Kansas City Chiefs QB Blaine Gabbert brings key instinct to role behind Mahomes

Jet skiing with his two younger brothers last December in Hillsborough Bay, Florida, Blaine Gabbert heard what he recalled a day later as a vague and “faint noise” in the distance.

Turning that way, he saw what initially looked like a crew boat that had broken up into several pieces and what appeared to be two yellow life jackets.

“It was kind of surreal,” said Gabbert, the former Mizzou star quarterback who was then with Tampa Bay and now is the Chiefs’ primary backup to Patrick Mahomes. “Those things happen in slow motion, and you’ve kind of got to make split-second decisions.”

In this case, that meant hurrying to the scene even fearing the worst along the way: On the approach, it became apparent it was a downed helicopter.

“I was kind of preparing for a bad deal,” he said in an interview with The Star on Wednesday at the Chiefs’ Missouri Western State training camp. “You don’t expect everybody to be in one piece when a helicopter goes down.”

Somehow, though, the crash hadn’t left the pilot or any of the three passengers dead. But it left each in peril and varying degrees of danger and panic stranded in the cold water covered in oil.

When Gabbert and brothers Tyler and Brett arrived, one said he was pinned and another was visibly shaken. Several hadn’t inflated the life jackets. Gabbert promptly called 911.

By the time emergency rescue services arrived moments later, though …

Gabbert “and his brothers had actually just about completed the rescue,” Officer Dan Spears of the Tampa police department marine unit said at a news conference the next day. “It was a pretty impressive feat, no doubt.”

Including the instinctive poise and presence of mind to instruct the victims on how to inflate their life vests … and then somehow hoist two of them onto his jet ski … while pulling the pilot free with a rope … as his brothers pulled up another onto their jet ski.

While Gabbert tried to stay anonymous, preferred to credit the emergency workers and said he just did what he would hope any human being would do, the fact is he and his brothers did something few could handle both emotionally and physically.

“I can honestly say,” he said, “we stayed super calm.”

As much as that might say about him as a person, it also at least suggests something about him professionally should Mahomes suffer an injury that leaves Gabbert called upon to save the day.

To borrow from the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” well, that’s a huge asset in the task that comes with a certain constant ambient pressure even as you know not when you may be called upon.

It’s a job that most recently here was performed admirably by the-now retired Chad Henne, a former teammate who helped steer Gabbert here, and a role Gabbert understands from spending the last three seasons as the understudy to Tom Brady in Tampa.

The awesome responsibility starts with Gabbert’s reckoning that he has the exceedingly rare privilege to work back-to-back with “probably the two greatest quarterbacks ever to play this game, in my eyes.”

“There’s a standard that those two set, and that’s a very hard standard to live up to, but you do your best,” he said. “They expect excellence out of everybody.”

Noting that he expects the same out of himself and tries to push Mahomes (and Brady before) to be better every way he can, he added, “There’s always that kind of symbiotic relationship between the starter and the backup. You have to be attached at the hip: I have to see the game the way Patrick sees the game. I had to see the game the way Tom saw the game. I’m a sounding board on the sideline. …

“That’s a relationship that’s built kind of through sweat equity over time, one that’s not going to happen overnight. Happens organically.”

But it’s been happening already with Mahomes, who, like Brady, is what Gabbert calls a “maniacal perfectionist.”

Like anyone else from afar, he could see Mahomes’ overwhelming talent.

“To see it in person, to see the way he prepares for practice (and see him) off the field, that’s what has really stood out,” Gabbert said. “There’s a reason he’s had probably the best start of any NFL career in history.”

Gabbert has arrived here later in a career that unfurled differently than he might have anticipated that 2011 night in New York when he was, like Mahomes, drafted 10th overall by a team that traded up for him (Jacksonville). Working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time of the draft, I spent those days on that great adventure with the St. Louis-area native and his family.

When we spoke Wednesday, we both suddenly realized that was the last time we’d seen each other.

And, well, it was great to catch up and to see how thoughtful and at ease he is in his own skin as a grown man.

“It’s flown by. … I’m like, ‘what happened?!’ I still feel 21,” he said. “Now I’m one of the oldest guys on the team.”

All of a sudden, he’s 33 and entering his 12th NFL season and playing for his sixth team. He’s appeared in 67 games overall, starting 48, and thrown just 35 regular-season passes (completing 22) in the last four seasons — including the 2019 season he sat out with an injury.

Sure, he wishes he’d become “a franchise guy” and won two Super Bowls right away. But some things in his control didn’t go as he’d hoped, he said, and some things felt out of his control.

“I’ve come to peace with everything that’s happened throughout my career: decisions made, decisions I didn’t make,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason. There’s a reason I ended up in Tampa. There’s a reason I ended up here.”

A reason that feels like the right place and the right time. The husband (to former Mizzou basketball player Bekah Mills) and father to a young daughter has a fresh sense of home — just hours away from both where he grew up and Bekah’s hometown of Towanda, Kansas.

That feeling is also in part because he’s invigorated by his arrival here, including the chance to work with Andy Reid.

But it’s also in part because of the ever-changing nature of his journey and the “weird, twisted” pleasure he takes in the challenge of learning a new — and particularly intricate — system.

“It makes you feel like a rookie,” he said, “because you have to go back to basics” toward creating “true mastery” of the offense.

Basics that require an essential foundation — the rare ability to slow things down in crisis that he demonstrated last December.