Patrick Mahomes Weeks 15-17 film reviews: Some big picture takeaways
Looking at every snap of the final 3 weeks of Mahomes' season and walking away with a view from 5,000 feet in the air before the playoffs start.
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.
How well Patrick Mahomes plays will be the single most important factor in determining whether or not the Chiefs win the Super Bowl.
It’s such an obvious statement to make, but I think it has somehow gotten lost in the conversation this season. With all the talk about the left tackle situation, or Jaylen Watson’s potential return, or the WR room being mostly whole, or the pass rush, or whatever other issues that could swing one way or the other (I’ll be writing about the key issues for Kansas City in the playoffs another time, of course), it’s easy to forget that everything begins and ends with the best quarterback the league has ever seen. When Mahomes plays at his best (which has been the case virtually every time he’s played in the playoffs), the Chiefs are almost impossible to beat. If he doesn’t, they become much more mortal.
With that in mind, I thought I’d change things up just a little bit in our “weekly” (sorry they haven’t been weekly over the last month) Mahomes film reviews. With Weeks 15-17, I continued my practice of charting every snap (of course). However, I think it makes sense to talk about Mahomes’ film, as well as the offense as a whole, in a broader way rather than honing in too closely on each individual game. So I thought I’d look at the trends from three straight games (two against playoff teams), especially as the offense finally showed a bit of rhythm in the final two weeks Mahomes played.
So that’s what we’re going to do today. I’ll provide the charted numbers designed to isolate QB play from the rest of the offense, and you can take from those what you will. But rather than looking at each game individually (though I’ll be making references to his performance in each), I want to talk about a few larger takeaways looking at the games as a whole. Those larger takeaways will be about Mahomes himself as well as the overall offensive gameplan/strategy we saw towards the end of the season.
Let’s talk Mahomes’ film over the last 3 weeks, some bigger overall takeaways one can grab about him as the playoffs loom, and get ready for some “the Chiefs REAL season is finally here” football.
If you’re looking for the previous weeks’ film reviews, you can find them here.
-Week 1 (which lays out the terms and methodology, a must-read for first-timers)
-(No week 11 yet, but I’ll come back to it!)
-(No week 14 done as of now)