Mahomes, Chiefs Hit Rock Bottom vs. Raiders

Let’s be clear about one thing: on the list of problems with the Chiefs offense, Patrick Mahomes is at the very bottom. While he’s having the worst season of his career statistically, the level of play around him hasn’t exactly been up to the Chiefs’ standards. I mean, how many times have we seen him hit his receivers in the hands only to have the ball pop up into the air and result in an interception?

Mahomes’ throwing metrics support the idea that he’s not the main problem. According to Pro-Football-Reference, his on-target % and bad-throw % are both career bests.

None of this means Mahomes is without any blame, however.

On Monday against the Raiders, he was all over the place. He didn’t pull the trigger on several open throws, didn’t see the field well, fled the pocket too early, and was unwilling to let the offense work around him.

This has been an issue at times throughout the season. According to PFF data, Mahomes has scrambled on a career high 7.61% of his dropbacks this season. Take that for what it’s worth, but it’s somewhat of an indicator that he’s been a little too quick to try and make plays outside of structure.

It all came to a head on Monday. The result was a haphazard performance that resulted in a bad 20-14 loss.

The pick-6 Mahomes threw occupied most of the post-game analysis. But the bigger concern to me was the number of plays he left on the field. This game could have gone a lot differently than it did.

Just take this example on K.C.’s second drive of the game. The area to focus on is in the middle of the field where the Chiefs had a dig/shallow-in route combination called. This was a high-low read on the middle linebacker for Mahomes:

Mahomes was looking right at the route combo. The linebacker bit on the shallow-in, which left the dig open behind it:

He didn’t throw it, though, and took off right at the top of his drop despite the fact that there really wasn’t any pressure. The result was a 7-yard scramble (that probably looked like it was Mahomes making something out of nothing on TV) instead of a much bigger play:

Here’s another example of Mahomes fleeing the pocket and running around to try and make something happen instead of hitting his back foot and getting the ball out to an open receiver right in front of him: