Patrick Mahomes Week 16 film review... Only. Weird. Games.
Looking at every dropback of one of the worst Chiefs offensive performances of the last 6 years. It's everyone, including the QB.
You know the drill. Every week (well, most weeks) I’ll be charting every dropback by Patrick Mahomes this year, just like I’ve done for… well, his whole career. As I laid out in the Week 1 film review (which is unlocked so you can see the methodology in more detail), statistical analysis of quarterbacks, especially in small sample sizes, doesn’t really tell us the whole story or even most of it. So I chart things that the QB can control, such as accuracy, pocket presence, franchise throws, going through reads, and more.
A lot can change in a week.
Don’t believe me? Here’s my opening sentence from last week’s film review: “You might’ve missed it in the chaos, but Patrick Mahomes is back to playing almost perfect football.”
Barely a week and one disastrous offensive performance later, and my entire week of DM’s, mentions, and emails consist of basically one question: “How bad was Mahomes against the Raiders?”
People have a lot of questions, and deservedly so after such a poor outing by the Chiefs offense. People want to know what the problem was. Was the offensive line getting abused? Were guys not getting open or in the wrong spot? Was Mahomes just bad? People generally want to know what The Thing is.
The problem is that it wasn’t just One Thing on Sunday. It was the rarely-seen All The Things. Because every single thing you’ve heard about how poorly the Chiefs performed Sunday is very likely true. Well, almost every single thing. But we’ll circle back to that.
Let’s start with Mahomes. What everyone wants to know is whether he was indeed missing open receivers, bailing out of pockets, playing frantic, etc. And the short answer is that Mahomes was indeed not good on Christmas. In fact, it was one of the worst games I’ve charted by him (though not the worst). But interestingly enough, for all the bad (and there was a LOT), there was some good by Mahomes too. It just got missed amidst a storm of literally every other aspect of the offense failing as well.
In other words, when you ask me if it was the receivers, Mahomes, or the offensive line, my answer would be “yes.” And they basically took turns torpedoing drives.
I’ve already written this week about how the offense got to such a bad spot. Now it’s time to talk about exactly what was going wrong against the Raiders. And while we’re at it, I need to address one of the narratives currently making the rounds about the Chiefs that (from my perspective) badly mischaracterizes what the problem actually is.
It won’t be fun, but I think it’ll be enlightening. At least, it was for me to go through the film. Because this game was WEIRD for a lot of reasons, like the fact that Mahomes created yards on more plays than I’ve ever seen… to the point that it actually became a bad thing. Let’s unpack Mahomes’ Week 16 film.
(In case you want to check out prior weeks’ film reviews, here you go. Yes, there’s no Week 14, I’m sorry!)
-Week 1 (UNLOCKED, lays out the terms and methodology)
-Week 3 (no article, but the numbers are there in a week he was virtually flawless)