Patrick Mahomes Weeks 3 & 4 film review. What's going on?
Examining every snap from the last two weeks to try and figure out how Mahomes is playing as an individual, and what the issues have been.
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.
Chiefs fans have a lot of questions about Patrick Mahomes’ play over the last two weeks.
The Chiefs’ QB has looked, on first watch, a bit off in Weeks 3 and 4 after a relatively “meh” (for him) performance in Week 2 and a merely “OK” (for him) performance in Week 1. Most concerningly, yet another errant throw found its way to the opposing defense, bringing Mahomes’ interception total up to 5 for the season (with not a single game going by in which he didn’t throw a pretty bad pick).
More than that, though, Mahomes just looked… a bit weird. Uncomfortable. Rushed. Not in his usual total command of the offense. Willing to take off too quickly. And of course, that has sparked a lot of concern from fans even as the Chiefs improved to 4-0 and ended the week with sole possession of first place in the AFC.
And so given that we’re talking about two weeks of film rather than one, and given we’re discussing more broad topics than normal, I’ll be doing this film review a bit different. I’ll of course provide the charted numbers from Weeks 3 and 4, but then I want to go in a format that just answers the simple question; What was going wrong for Mahomes (both things that he could control and things that he couldn’t) in Week 3 and Week 4? And what is the answer?
Because upon review, I found that the issues in those back-to-back weeks were quite different, with the issues from Week 3 largely resolved in Week 4, but then a fresh issue rearing its head in Week 4. I also found that it’s a lot more complicated than “Mahomes is not playing well.” So let’s dive into it, first taking a deep breath and remembering we’ve got six years’ worth of reasons to believe that this is fixable, along with more good snaps than you likely remembered watching the games in real time.
Let’s talk some Patrick Mahomes film from that last two weeks.
If you’re looking for the previous weeks’ film reviews, you can find them here.
-Week 1 (which lays out the terms and methodology)