“The people that came before me, not just Shack Harris and Doug Williams, but the quarterbacks that battled and didn’t get their chances, they set the platform for me,” Mahomes, 27, said. “I know that it took a lot of evolution. It took a lot of people that came before me to be in this position.”
Mahomes and Hurts are two of the most exciting quarterbacks in today’s N.F.L., each with his own unique style of play. Mahomes, the son of a former major league pitcher, Pat Mahomes, has established himself as perhaps the most creative passer in the game’s history. Hurts, who led two different major college football programs to the playoffs, runs a balanced offense in which he set a new league record for rushing touchdowns this season.
Professional football has had multiple color barriers. Fritz Pollard was the first Black player in the N.F.L. in 1920, but the league had to be reintegrated in 1946 after a period during which team owners refused to sign any others. And there was long an impenetrable wall at quarterback, the most important position in the sport.
Forced to Change Positions
When Jimmy Raye was recruited to Michigan State in 1964, his mother asked the coach if he would be allowed to play at quarterback, where he had starred at a segregated high school in North Carolina.
It was the question that Black quarterbacks then — and for years to come — had to ask at every level of the game.
Coach Duffy Daugherty gave an opaque answer, Raye, 76, recalled. Raye enrolled at the university anyway, battled his way into a starting role and became the first Black quarterback from the South to win a national championship.