Tape Tells All: Patrick Mahomes' Sudden Breakdown

October 29, 2021

Justin Carter breaks down Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes's recent performance and evaluates his fantasy football upside going forward in the 2021 NFL season.

Welcome back to Tape Tells All, the weekly-ish series where I look at film for something that happened in the NFL this week.

Patrick Mahomes is bad now.

Alright, not bad, but he definitely doesn't look like vintage Patrick Mahomes right now. There's a lot of things that factor into that. Let's see if we can figure out why.

Background Information

I'm going to skip past a good chunk of the background on Patrick Mahomes because, well, you know Mahomes.

But his numbers this year are definitely not up to where Mahomes' numbers usually are at.

For example, Mahomes has thrown nine interceptions this year, which is already more than he threw in either 2019 or 2020. He's thrown the most interceptions in the NFL and is throwing a pick on 3.2 percent of his passes, by far the most of his NFL career. Last year, he led the NFL with the lowest interception rate at just 1.0 percent.

On the bright side, Mahomes is throwing a touchdown on 6.5 percent of passes, the same percentage as last year.

His intended air yards per attempt are down (8.4 to 7.7), which makes sense when you factor in the loss of Sammy Watkins and the hobbled-ness of Tyreek Hill.

That's a factor that doesn't get discussed enough with Mahomes: a lack of weapons. Sure, he has Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce, the best WR/T duo in the NFL. But his third-most targeted player is Mecole Hardman, who was supposed to be another big-play guy but is averaging just 9.6 yards per catch. Byron Pringle is fourth on the team in targets.

Watkins wasn't great, but the RotoViz Game Split app shows that since 2018, Mahomes played 32 games with Watkins and 20 without Watkins and there's a pretty stark difference:

The touchdowns and interceptions don't change much, but the yards per attempt drop by almost a yard in games where Watkins didn't play, and important for fantasy purposes is that his fantasy points per game drop around three points in games without Watkins.

Having a reliable third option on the field is huge, because it opens things up in the passing game.

Of course, Mahomes' struggles aren't just because of Sammy Watkins. The offensive line has been fine, ranking 11th in adjusted sack rate, but that's a downgrade from last year, when it ranked fourth in that stat.

Of course, none of this is to excuse that Mahomes has made some questionable decisions this season. Let's pause from the numbers to look at some of his bad plays.

The Game Tape

Interceptions can't always be blamed on just the quarterback, but the rise in Mahomes' interceptions can't just be written off.

Here's one of the issues with Mahomes: he likes to extend plays. I'm not sure if there's a "extends plays too long" metric, but if there was, I'd bet Mahomes is pretty high up on it.

And extending plays can be good, if you make the most of that extension. In the past, Mahomes has. But a drop in skill-position talent makes it harder to find opener players, and it leads to Mahomes forcing things, like the above interception against the Titans.

Let's look at this from a different angle:

Mahomes goes a good job moving out of a pocket that's about to break down, but then he just throws this terrible pass into coverage. He's on the run. His receiver has zero separation. What're you doing, Pat?

Not that everything is necessarily going bad.

Per PlayerProfiler, Mahomes is completing 42.9 percent of his deep passes, good for 13th in the NFL. Last year, he was at 37.7 percent, which ranked 22nd.

Really, I think the biggest issue is just that Mahomes isn't able to make those Superman plays. He presses, he turns the ball over. The defense is putting the Chiefs in worse situations, and Mahomes has to do too much, and then he doesn't have the range of weapons to help him do too much.

It's an issue that won't get solved this year without a trade — Allen Robinson? Brandin Cooks? Mahomes needs someone other than Mecole Hardman to be lineup up across from Hill, to help take pressure off and to create open space. Even with Hill on this team, the average receiver target separation for Mahomes is 1.63 yards, which ranks 34th among quarterbacks. Considering there are only 32 NFL teams, that's really not good. Some of that is on the receivers. Some is on who Mahomes targets. Some is a product of targeting Travis Kelce over the middle, where you don't need to worry about how small the window is.

But yeah, the defense isn't getting fixed. Mahomes will play from behind. He'll try to make plays. Maybe he'll adjust his style of play, but when Mahomes doesn't need to make those adjustments most years, will he make them temporarily now?

Fantasy Impact

This is a fantasy site, so let's talk about Mahomes in fantasy, which shouldn't be a long convo.

Is Mahomes struggling? Sure.

But when it comes to fantasy, there's not really anything that's changed here.

Mahomes is still the fantasy QB5. That loss against Tennessee was his first game scoring under 20 fantasy points this season, his worst fantasy showing since 2019, when he was injured against Denver.

It was a bad game. And Mahomes seems more likely to have bad games going forward than he's had in the past, but he's still a set-and-forget fantasy quarterback. Nothing's changed there. You might not be as happy as you usually are and there might be times you fade him more in DFS, but that's about it.

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