Should KC Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes be considered an MVP candidate? Or is it too late?
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes started the race in the pole position, but he relinquished that lead after the equivalent of two laps. The edge soon swung to Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, but his stint at the front didn’t last much longer, and Cowboys passer Dak Prescott took over.
Then came a Kyle Murray cameo. Next, a Josh Allen sighting. Then back to Brady. And after 16 weeks, the guy who sees everyone in his rearview mirror is the one who said he’d never win again.
Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
The NFL’s Most Valuable Player race has been a wild ride, and if the initial 16 weeks have forecast anything for what the final two might bring, it’s this: The race isn’t over yet.
Slowly creeping his way back into it is the quarterback who led when this all began — Mahomes. Seven weeks into the season, Mahomes’ odds sat at 40-to-1 for the league MVP in Las Vegas sportsbooks. But in a final stretch that includes Rodgers, Brady, even Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, Mahomes is back in the mix, now at 11-to-1.
He’s got some ground to make up, no doubt, but he is allotted one advantage.
Momentum.
He might have run out of the other.
Time.
Let’s take a look.
The basic numbers
• Patrick Mahomes (11-to-1 odds, per an average of Las Vegas sportsbooks): 11-4 record, 4,310 yards (fifth), 33 touchdowns (fifth), 13 interceptions, 55.3 QBR (seventh), 97.9 quarterback rating (11th)
• Aaron Rodgers (3-to-5, odds-on favorite): 3,689 yards (10th), 33 touchdowns (fifth), 4 interceptions, 67.8 QBR (first), 110.8 quarterback rating (first)
• Tom Brady (13-to-2 odds): 4,580 yards (first), 37 touchdowns (first), 65.7 QBR (second), 100.2 quarterback rating (seventh)
• Jonathan Taylor (6-to-1 odds): 1,626 rushing yards (first), 5.5 yards per attempt, 17 rushing touchdowns (first)
Takeaway: Mahomes has some ground to make up here, but it’s not as though he’s been completely left in the dust. He’s potentially still in it, if some other teams rest their starters in the season’s final week. Mahomes sat out the finale a year ago, and it hurt his overall numbers in race that Rodgers eventually won.
Best of the rest: We’re not necessarily discounting the other guys who are still in the conversation — Josh Allen, Dak Prescott, Cooper Kupp, Matthew Stafford or Joe Burrow — but this is about the favorites Mahomes is trying to catch in the race over the next two weeks.
A deeper dive
• Mahomes’ statistics — and therefore his MVP case — would be far stronger if he had his usual help from a typically reliable supporting cast. But no quarterback in the NFL has been more affected by dropped passes than Mahomes in terms of expected points lost. Six of his interceptions have had a 75% chance or better of being completed based on where he located the football, per Next Gen Stats — twice as many as the previous three years combined.
That’s a staggering number that has affected all of his other numbers — yards, completion percentage, quarterback rating ... and, to some extent, even the Chiefs’ win-loss record.
• To continue on that subject, while Mahomes has set a career high with 13 interceptions and tied a career high with nine fumbles, would you believe he’s been graded as more protective of the football than his career norm?
Only 2.6% of his plays have been graded turnover-worthy, per Pro Football Focus. If he finishes there, it would be the lowest percentage of his four seasons as a starting NFL quarterback.
It’s also the sixth-best in the league. Bad news, though: Brady is even lower at 1.9%, and Rodgers sits at 2.2%.
• Rodgers leads Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric, which essentially rates him as 25.4% better than the average quarterback when encountering identical game situations. Brady is second at 23%. Mahomes is seventh at 15.4%. Needless to say, that gap is too wide to be overhauled in just two weeks.
• Mahomes is completing fewer passes than he should be. He has a 66.1 completion percentage this season, but Next Gen Stats deems his expected completion percentage — a calculation based on several factors, including receiver separation, the depth of the target and the space a quarterback has to operate at the time of release — should be 68.3%. That leaves a difference of minus-2.2%, which is 12th worst in the league. Joe Burrow actually leads the NFL in this stat by a wide margin at 5.5%. Rodgers is fourth at 2.9%.
Takeaway: Some advanced stats cast Mahomes in a more favorable light than the basic numbers and illustrate perhaps some plain bad luck; but some are more harsh. Analytics tend to get mentioned often when discussing MVP awards, as they should, though much less frequently among the panel of 50 media members actually casting the votes.
The case for Mahomes
It’s a case he’ll need to bolster over these final two weeks, but given how he’s played in the previous three, he’s capable. The Chiefs could end the season on a 10-game winning streak and as the Super Bowl favorite. That counts. He’s played his best football recently — he was named the AFC player of the month for December — after some questioned whether NFL defenses had simply figured him out. It’s required serious adjustments, and he’s made them.
The interceptions are more confounding, if not misleading, than they are revealing. They haven’t all been his fault. In fact, they haven’t even mostly been his fault.
One last point: It’s not as though these other options are overwhelming. Rodgers threw for 48 touchdowns in winning the award last year. This year feels more like the MVP is going to go to whoever’s left standing at the end.
Why it’s an uphill battle
Mahomes in 2021 experienced the worst luck of his four seasons as a starter, but he’s also played his worst football for prolonged stretches, and it would be unusual to win the league’s MVP during a year in which that statement is true. Six of his eight worst-rated outings have come this season.
The Chiefs won games over the middle portion of their schedule in spite of their offense, not because of it.
Mahomes has come through it to the other side, and it’s likely he’ll be better for it in the long run, even this postseason — but that stretch still matters. We can’t just ignore it.
Bottom line
Mahomes isn’t the favorite in Las Vegas anymore. And this deeper look indicates that despite all of his magic recently, he shouldn’t be the favorite. He dug himself too deep a hole in the middle part of the season.
The question is whether it’s over.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But he’d sure need to blow it out of the water over these final two weeks. In a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately era, a strong five-game finish could put him back in the mix.
This story was originally published December 31, 2021 at 10:21 AM with the headline "Should KC Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes be considered an MVP candidate? Or is it too late?."