Patrick Mahomes' Week 7 review: What's ailing the offense?
Patrick Mahomes' Week 7 review: What's ailing the offense?
A lot of blame has been thrown around, but the biggest culprit Sunday was the last person I expected
One of the most unique things about Patrick Mahomes is his consistency. Despite playing a wild, seemingly gunslinging style of football, he’s always a player one can depend on to be, at the very least, above average.
I’ve been charting Patrick Mahomes’ snaps since his very first game with the Chiefs, and even on weeks where he’s accused of being “bad” (like the Super Bowl last year, or even 2 weeks ago against the Bills) a closer look at the film has always… ALWAYS… at least partly vindicated him and shown a lot of good that outweighs the bad.
While Mahomes hasn’t been perfect throughout his career, he’s managed to play over 3 seasons now without ever having a performance (when healthy) that I would actually call “bad” by normal quarterback standards. His “bad” was still better than what many other quarterbacks could do, and in every game where he shouldered the blame for poor statistical output (a rarity), a closer look always showed other issues in the offense that were much more to blame than Mahomes.
That streak ended Sunday, as Mahomes played the worst game I’ve ever seen him play as a pro, particularly in the first half. He struggled with things that have generally been old hat for him over the course of his career, and wasn’t able to make up for it with miraculous plays on the other side of things. It was, overall, a genuinely bad game for Mahomes. And not just “bad for him.” But actually… bad.
In the several thousand snaps of Mahomes I’ve watched, he’s never played a game as poorly as he did Sunday. It’s really not even that close. I’ll let that sink in, and let’s go to the film.
If you are unfamiliar with how I chart and write about quarterback play, the Week 1 review explains the methodology and reasoning, as well as the definitions used. The goal, as ever, is to separate the QB play from what is around the QB to get a better gauge on how he did on his own. You can find the previous views by clicking the links below:
Week 4 film review (one of the best performances of his career)
Week 5 film review (a performance where he struggled for him, but the good still outweighed the bad)
Week 6 film review (wherein the fire-breathing dragon returned)
Let’s look at the numbers, then talk about what went wrong Sunday.