Jeff Saturday and Ryan Clark discuss Patrick Mahomes and the impact he is having on the Chiefs as well as how talented he really is. (1:20)

It's appropriate that the Kansas City Chiefs are on Monday Night Football next week, because their offense probably isn't suitable for afternoon television. Coach Andy Reid's passing attack laid waste to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, as Patrick Mahomes & Co. scored five consecutive first-half touchdowns to take a 35-7 lead en route to a 38-27 victory. Their performance was sadly overshadowed by the serious knee injury suffered by 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, but the Chiefs' offense is the most entertaining part of this NFL season through three weeks.

The numbers are truly staggering. Through three games, the Chiefs have scored 15 offensive touchdowns, tying them with the 1998 49ers and the 2013 Broncos for the most touchdowns through the first three games of the year since the merger. They join the 2007 Patriots as the only team since 1970 to score five or more touchdowns in each of their first three games.

Mahomes deserves his own section. He has become the first quarterback in league history to throw 13 touchdown passes over the first three games of a season. He is averaging 12.4 adjusted yards per pass over the first three weeks, which would be the second-best start to a season in league history for a player with 25 passes or more per game, placing Mahomes just in between seasons from Otto Graham (1953) and Tom Brady (2007). The fact that the Texas Tech product is pulling this off in his second, third and fourth career starts makes this even more remarkable.

Obviously, plenty of organizations across the league are looking enviously at the Chiefs and wishing their offense seemingly generated points at will. As much as they might imagine having Mahomes in their building, a good chunk of the league had its chance. Ten teams passed on their shot at drafting Mahomes, including the Browns, Bears, Jets and Bills, each of whom drafted a quarterback in the top 10 of the 2017 or 2018 drafts.

If they can't have Mahomes, the next best thing for an organization to do is copy what the Chiefs did to get their star quarterback and build a transcendent offense around him. Here are the lessons the NFL can learn from the Chiefs and their record-setting start to the season:

Don't be afraid of the spread

Not the gambling spread or the postgame spread, but the spread offense. Despite the fact that we've seen spread concepts infiltrate virtually every single college football attack over the past 15 years, the NFL has seen it more as a nuisance than anything else. While there have been exceptions (with the Patriots as a notable early adopter), there have been plenty of successful coaches around the league who were skeptical of both the spread and the read-option concepts that helped fill in its running game.

Bruce Arians called the read-option "a great college offense" in 2013 and followed up by suggesting spread signal-callers "weren't real quarterbacks" in 2015. Mike Tomlin called the read-option the "flavor of the month" in comparing it to the Wildcat. Ex-players and coaches have complained about the quality and technique of quarterbacks and offensive linemen coming out of college, suggesting it's responsible for a decline in the quality of NFL play last season. Even the general idea that the NFL used to be better goes back 25 years.

Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid and the Chiefs are 3-0 and blowing out good teams. Photo by Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports

Reid, who spent his assistant-coaching career learning the West Coast offense under Bill Walsh disciple Mike Holmgren in Green Bay, could easily have been one of those coaches who relied on what he knew to continue working. Holmgren, for one, was skeptical of the development curve for spread passers heading to the pros, noting how they needed to adapt to playing from under center.

Instead, the former Eagles coach spent years building to this moment. Reid incorporated some spread concepts with Michael Vick during his final few years in Philadelphia, but the learning curve accelerated after the Chiefs hired former Vikings coach Brad Childress to serve as their spread game analyst and special projects coordinator in March 2013. Reid also hired former Nevada coach Chris Ault, who developed the pistol offense and launched Colin Kaepernick's career, to serve as a consultant.

Over the ensuing five years, the Chiefs integrated more spread concepts into their offense for Alex Smith, who played in the spread under Urban Meyer at Utah. The spread and the read-option aren't the same thing, but read-option statistics are a useful proxy for a team's comfort with spread principles. According to ESPN Stats & Information, the Chiefs used the read-option on 28 rushing plays in 2013. That number rose to 41 in 2014, 64 in 2015, 74 in 2016, and 87 last season. Ault left to go coach in Europe after two seasons, and Childress followed former offensive coordinator Matt Nagy out the door to Chicago this past offseason, but the Chiefs are quite clearly comfortable employing what they've learned.

The solution to Holmgren's concerns about employing a spread quarterback like Mahomes under center? Just don't put him there. Mahomes has thrown 85 of his 93 passes out of the pistol or shotgun this season, the fourth-highest percentage in the league among starting quarterbacks. The Chiefs have run 17 read-option plays through three weeks, putting them on pace for 90. Those runs have generated only 37 yards, but it has been a devastating short-yardage tactic, producing five first downs.

One of the ways to combat concerns about offensive line play is to terrify teams with five eligible receivers and dare defenses to get to the quarterback before he gets the ball out. Mahomes spent plenty of time working out of empty backfields during his time at Texas Tech under Kliff Kingsbury in the Air Raid. Mahomes has been an absolute demon out of empty sets this season. When he has been by himself in the backfield, he is 15-of-18 for 208 yards with three touchdowns, no interceptions and a passer rating of 154.4 without ever being sacked.

Reid also has popularized plays that saw success in college spread attacks at the professional level. Last year, it was the power read shovel concept near the goal line, a play that a handful of teams around the league were running by midseason. This season, the Chiefs have installed what is known perhaps most commonly as a "touch pass," which is essentially an end-around from a jet sweep, only with the motioning receiver running in front of the quarterback. While other teams have run the touch pass before in the NFL for a snap here or there, the Chiefs went to it for two touchdowns in Week 1. In the ensuing weeks, we've seen a number of teams add it to their playbooks.

It's fair to note that Mahomes doesn't fit the clichéd ideas of what failed spread quarterbacks from the past lacked. He had the freedom and responsibility to both define protections and change plays before the snap. He was capable of reading the entire field and making throws when his first two or three options weren't open. Crucially, though, he also has the arm strength to make the smallest of passing windows count and to scare teams that leave their cornerbacks on an island one-on-one downfield.

At the same time, the league is growing more comfortable with schemes and concepts that were once written off as gimmicky. The Air Raid was once a scheme designed to give Hal Mumme's Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State and Kentucky teams a chance to compete with bigger schools full of better athletes. When Kentucky quarterback Tim Couch failed to develop into a superstar after being drafted with the first overall pick, the league seemed to sour on valuing spread quarterbacks, reducing them mostly to late-round picks as roster filler. Exceptions such as Brandon Weeden and Kevin Kolb also failed to impress in larger roles.

Things are changing. The Rams used the first overall pick on Jared Goff after he excelled as an Air Raid quarterback at Cal, and while he struggled in his first season, Goff eventually rounded into an excellent quarterback under Sean McVay. The Eagles won the Super Bowl with a heavy dosage of mesh, the double crossing route concept that stands as the most notable play of the Air Raid offense. Their quarterback in that game was Nick Foles, who was an Air Raid quarterback at Arizona. He took over for Carson Wentz, who ran a spread offense at North Dakota State. The coach putting that all together was Doug Pederson, who was running what Broncos cornerback Chris Harris Jr. characterized as a college offense after the Eagles dropped 51 on Denver in midseason. And Pederson, of course, was a West Coast quarterback who taught himself the spread to coach in high school before serving as an assistant under Reid.