- Deep-ball placement hits a career low: Mahomes recorded a career-low 33.9% accuracy rate on deep pass attempts last season, heavily influenced by an uncharacteristic 30 overthrows from clean pockets over the past two years.
- Underneath efficiency reaches new heights: To combat deep defensive coverages, Mahomes has successfully adapted his short game, securing four consecutive seasons with an accurate throw rate above 70.0% on passes within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage.
- Scrambling rates double ahead of injury recovery: Reflecting an increasingly restricted pocket environment, Mahomes scrambled on 8.9% of his dropbacks last season—nearly double his 4.4% scramble rate from his first year as a starter.
When you ask an NFL fan to close their eyes and tell you who the best player in the NFL is today, many, without hesitation, will still say Patrick Mahomes.
While that opinion is still understandable, it’s becoming harder to justify. Mahomes finished the past two seasons as PFF’s eighth- and 15th-highest-graded quarterback, respectively. After earning five PFF grades above 90.0 over his first six seasons as a starter, he now enters his age-31 season coming off back-to-back good-not-great years with the added complication of the torn ACL suffered last season.
For the first time in Mahomes’ illustrious career, his future appears somewhat murky. The Chiefs are no longer Super Bowl favorites. As things stand today, they are not even among the top five.
We know a lot about how Kansas City’s surrounding circumstances have changed. Linemen and receivers have come and gone. Travis Kelce is fighting a losing battle against Father Time, and Andy Reid has experimented with different approaches in a bid to prevent his Mahomes-led offense from becoming stale.
But what has changed about Patrick Mahomes himself? When he burst onto the scene in 2018 and then led a Super Bowl-winning campaign in 2019, Mahomes looked like a quarterback who had not yet reached his final form. His playstyle suggested he would only improve with time, and many anticipated the overlap between his physical and mental primes around age 30 would produce some of the greatest quarterback play we had ever seen. That hasn’t happened — at least not yet.
Even if Mahomes had played the final three games of the 2025 season, he still likely would have finished with career lows in passing yards, passing touchdowns and completion percentage. That decline came despite the Chiefs operating the second-most pass-heavy offense in football. Only the Arizona Cardinals threw the ball at a higher rate, though they were also playing from behind far more often.