So When Are We Allowed to Ask the Patrick Mahomes Question?

his last two seasons have been the worst of his career

While I’ve always found him and the Chiefs annoying, I’ve also been someone who has felt that Patrick Mahomes was very likely to pass Tom Brady as the best of all time at the quarterback position. I’ve felt that it was asinine to suggest that he has passed Brady already, given how much longer and more packed Brady’s resume is, but it certainly looked like that eventual handover was coming, and maybe soon. I was a Mahomes hater, but I was never a Mahomes skeptic, for the simple reason that he had the incredible numbers to go along with all of the team success. The thing is, the last two seasons he hasn’t had the individual numbers to go along with the team success, and now that he’s lost a Super Bowl that was 40-6 when the Eagles were playing their starters, I would love it if we’d have a conversation about just how badly he’s fallen off. But because he’s Patrick Mahomes, and the media has been going hard with the Greatest Of All Time story for years, they don’t want to take a hard look at those numbers. Once again, sports media commitment to a narrative in defiance of the facts is very annoying and leads to bad analysis! The trend, though, is undeniable.

Mahomes hit the ground running, statistically, in his first year as a starter in 2018. That year’s Chiefs team scored the third-most points in NFL history, behind only Peyton Manning’s record 2013 season and Tom Brady’s 16-0 team in the 2007 regular season. Mahomes threw for 5097 yards, 50 touchdowns (11 more than the next nearest player), both first in the league, and led the league in average yards per attempt, average net yards per attempt, and QBR. He justly capped the season with his first MVP award. He did not win in the three following years, which saw the trophy go to Lamar Jackson and Aaron Rodgers twice. But he largely maintained his excellent play in those seasons. His 2019 season was less stellar than 2018, thanks in part to missing two games with injury, but he still threw for over 4000 yards, had a 1% interception rate, and finished second in the league in QBR behind MVP Jackson. His 2020 season was even more impressive, as he was led the Chiefs to a 14-1 record while leading the league in yards per game, posting an excellent 38-6 TD/Int ratio, and placing second in the league with 4740 yards, behind only a 4-12 season from Deshaun Watson where he chucked the ball all game every game. Mahomes was also second in ANY/A and QBR. In 2021, he was a top-five QB in all manner of relevant stats, and in 2022 he recaptured the MVP award, leading the league with a massive 5250 passing yards, 41 passing touchdowns, and a league-leading 79 QBR on the way to a 14-3 record and a Super Bowl victory and MVP. It was a standard-setting offensive performance, the kind that fundamentally reorients our sense of what’s possible in NFL football.

And then there’s 2023 and 2024. Mahomes has looked worse in almost any conventional stats. 2024 saw his lowest totals in passing TDs and passing yards in a full season as a starter. 2023 and 2024 were his worst full seasons in TD%, in QBR, average yards per attempt, average net yards per attempt, in quarterback rating….Michael David Smith writes of his 2024 season specifically,

Mahomes averaged 7.0 yards per pass, the worst of his career. He averaged 261.4 passing yards per game, the worst of his career. He threw a touchdown on 4.5 percent of his passes, the lowest of his career. He threw an interception on 2.3 percent of his passes, the highest of his career. His passer rating was 92.6, the worst of his career. He was sacked on 4.33 percent of his dropbacks, the most of his career.

good completion %, pretty good EPA, not exceptional in either

When it comes to advanced stats, you could look at success rate, one of the most widely-embraced modern metrics; 2023 and 2024 saw the two worst full Mahomes seasons in success rate for passing, while 2024 was his second-worst rushing season by success rate. EPA is like a lot of other stats: Mahomes looks pretty good the last couple years, but his established standard has been amazing, not pretty good. In 2023, Mahomes had an EPA per dropback of .07, good for 10th in the league, while in 2024 he ranked 6th. This year he was also 6th in value over average starter. These are all still good advanced metric ranks. They’re still better than most fanbases can hope from for their quarterbacks. But they’re not elite, not on the same level as MVP candidates Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen and Joe Burrow, and certainly not oh-my-god-we’ve-never-seen-this-before territory. Which is an obvious change from where he was earlier in his career!

Put it this way: can you imagine living through the first five years of Mahomes’s career and being told “The Chiefs will finish with a 15-2 record and the 1 seed, Patrick Mahomes will not even be an MVP finalist, and no one will complain about that fact”? The way that Chiefs fan media has been scrambling to dismiss all of this statistical evidence tells you something, and while fantasy success is famously separate from the real thing, the fact that Mahomes has been a fantasy irrelevance for two seasons does speak to his declining production.

Here’s one interesting dynamic: Mahomes has set career bests in completion percentage in consecutive years. That might sound good, but in general there’s an inverse relationship between completion percentage and aggressiveness; a more aggressive passer is a passer who’s going to miss more throws but who’s confident that he can more than make up for it with his greater downfield production. I think people underestimate how much of a high risk/high reward player Mahomes has been in his career - everybody remembers the incredible 54-51 Rams-Chiefs game, but most people don’t remember that Mahomes had five turnovers in that game. They were still in the game because he was so incredible at attacking deep, again and again and again, to the tune of 478 yards. And that, more than anything, is what has changed: the Chiefs have become notoriously bad at generating explosive pass plays. In Mahomes’s first MVP season, they were first in producing explosives game. This past year, they were 31st out of 32, behind only the lowly Las Vegas Raiders in pushing the ball downfield quickly. And to me that’s the real sadness: even when I was rooting against him, Mahomes was a ton of fun to watch because he was such an aggressive passer. Now, it’s the complete opposite, and this Chiefs team has become a machine of grim, boring competence, slowly matriculating the ball down the field. No thanks.

There’s some conventional responses to what I’m observing here. First, there’s the fact that the game in general is seeing a lot less explosive downfield passing than it did a half-decade ago. This is true, and it’s not like I blame Mahomes for not replicating the 5000 yard/50 TDs passing seasons of the past. But this doesn’t change the fact that Mahomes’s relative production is down so much, that he’s no longer ranking among the top handful of performers. Many people point to a declining Chiefs roster, especially a diminished Travis Kelce. I do recognize that Kelce is a shell of his former self, but I think people are overstating the quality of the Chiefs rosters of the past - yes, they would have loved to have Tyreek Hill yesterday, but people have been insisting that they don’t miss Hill for years, and anyway it’s really hard for me to look at the skill position players Mahomes was working with in his 2022 MVP year and conclude that, yeah, they were much better. The offensive line looked awful yesterday, but prior to the game last night many listed the Chiefs O-line as a core strength, and Creed Humphrey and Joe Thuney (when playing guard) are as good as it gets. The defense got worked last night, but prior to the game many argued that the Chiefs D might secretly be the best in the league. I do agree that Andy Reid has lost his fastball as an offensive guru, but he’s still a better coach than all but a small handful of his peers. You can point out that the Eagles are really good, but then that’s what it means to want to be the greatest team of all time, right - you don’t care who lines up against you. I just don’t see how you can deny what your eyes and the stats are telling you, that Mahomes is seriously diminished when compared to his incredible standard.

Of course, the reason why no one has wanted to point any of this out has been because the Chiefs kept winning; it sounds stupid to say that the quarterback of a two-time defending Super Bowl champion isn’t playing his best. And sports media, for all of its reputation for wild hot takes, tend to foster extreme risk avoidance among pundits, who don’t want to look foolish and who know that the easiest way to avoid that is to stick with the favorites. This is true of even the best. I’m not at all surprised the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen wouldn’t hear of criticizing Mahomes, but you’d like for the conversation to at last happen. I really like Sheil Kapadia, Steven Ruiz, and Diante Lee of the Ringer, but they quickly dismissed any talk of a Mahomes decline. So did Ben Solak and Mina Kimes of ESPN, so did the Good Morning Football crew. Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen don’t even consider it.

And, you know, I get it. Because look, I’m certainly not arguing that Mahomes can’t get back there. He obviously has all of the tools. The Chiefs will have a hard time seriously upgrading that roster, especially with old Kelce never coming back and Chris Jones maybe starting to slow down. But there’s every reason to think that they can come back. But what I have to insist on is this: if any of the league’s other elite quarterbacks had back-to-back season that were dramatically worse than their best seasons, if they backslid in almost every statistical category, if their greatest strength had somehow become a weakness in a couple of years, if Jackson or Allen or Burrow had gotten worse in the same way and to the same degree… we would absolutely be having a conversation. And I think we should be having one about Mahomes. If he comes back and has an MVP year next season, no one will remember, and fair enough. But if he continues to regress for a third straight year, the story’s going to become too big to ignore.