Kansas City Chiefs: So much for Patrick Mahomes regressing
After Patrick Mahomes threw for 5,000 yards and 50 touchdowns, everyone called for the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback to regress. But he might be better.
When Patrick Mahomes took over for his first full season as the Kansas City Chiefs‘ starting quarterback, the general public expected big things in Andy Reid‘s dynamic offense. He delivered above and beyond that, winning NFL MVP in his first season as a starter. Now he’s defying expectations once again in 2019, his second season at the helm of the offense.
In the 2018 campaign, Mahomes was truly remarkable. Completing 66.0 percent of his passes, the Texas Tech product and 2017 first-round pick threw for 5,097 yards, 50 touchdowns and just 12 interceptions. He was everything an more that Chiefs fans hoped he’d be, creating a bright future for the franchise as long as he’s in place.
On the heels of that successful sophomore season in the NFL, though, the prevailing narrative was, to paraphrase, that there was no way Patrick Mahomes could sustain that level of play. He was going to regress in the 2019 season, even if that still left him as a top-tier quarterback in the NFL.
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Through the first three weeks of the year, though, there have been no signs of regression. In fact, Mahomes is on pace to be even better this season than he was en route to winning MVP last year.
Having thrown for 1,195 yards and 10 touchdowns through the first three games, Mahomes is currently on pace to throw for 6,373 yards and 53 touchdowns in a 16-game season. Furthermore, the Chiefs signal-caller has yet to throw an interception on the year.
The way that Mahomes has performed thus far in the 2019 season has been remarkable. He’s thrown for at least 370 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions in each of the first three games of the season. According to Pro Football Reference, those thresholds have only been hit 77 times throughout the entire league since the 2010 season.
More impressively, though, no player over that same timespan has ever done that in three consecutive games and only 10 quarterbacks prior to Mahomes had done it in back-to-back games. He’s cruising and producing at levels that we’ve legitimately not seen in the past decade.
And if you needed something to make what Mahomes is doing right now even more unbelievable, this run that he’s on to begin the 2019 season has been done almost wholly without Tyreek Hill on the field. So not only is he producing at an unprecedented pace but he’s doing it without perhaps his most explosive weapon on the field.
Will Mahomes continue to throw for 370 yards and three touchdowns in every game throughout the 2019 season? Of course not. These are human beings, not computer simulations, meaning that there are going to be ebbs and flows in regards to performance.
At the same time, though, even with ups and downs throughout the remaining 13 games on the Chiefs schedule, Mahomes is clearly in line to either match or better his MVP-caliber production from the 2018 season.
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Sorry to tell anyone that thought Patrick Mahomes was about to drop off in 2019 but it’s not happening. He’s as good, if not better than he was in the 2018 season. And for opposing defenses throughout the NFL, that’s a terrifying notion to consider.