Patrick Mahomes Is The Revolution
Let's talk football.
In the lead up to the World Cup, ESPN slapped down a click-bait headline for the ages: why Lionel Messi is the best male athlete of all time. It’s a lot of words for a Tweet-length syllogism:
(A) Lionel Messi is the best soccer player ever
(B) Since the most people play it, soccer is the most competitive of all global sports
So… Messi is the best player at any sport ever
This argument has a lot of merit: I’ll take to my grave a belief that if you gave LeBron a stick and six months of practice, he’d be the best lacrosse player in the country1. But what grabbed me reading it was the iconic subreddit it highlighted - r/TopRightMessi. It’s a channel solely dedicated to Messi’s greatness. Literally. It is only graphs showing Messi alone in the top right - incomparably better than peers (Ronaldo, Mbappe, etc.). It reminds me of a FiveThirtyEight classic: Steph Curry Is The Revolution. The article uses similar graphs to show how Curry destroys the efficiency-volume tradeoff in every sport. He’s both the most-prolific and most effective shooter. The more he shot, the better he got.
Both Curry and Messi break my brain. The sport they’re playing resembles nothing I’ve seen. They’re so incredible at their main skills - shooting and goal-scoring - that they aren’t just a bit better than their peers, they’re playing a whole ‘nother game. Watching Messi hoist the trophy in Qatar, I was reminded me of another sui generis athlete. He’s well appreciated as the best in his sport and probably will win the Most Valuable Player this year. His teams regularly win, and win big.
And yet…. And yet… He is still criminally underrated. Patrick Mahomes, step on up. Let’s have you a day.
My take: Mahomes isn’t just the best quarterback in the NFL, he’s finishing the greatest five-year run of quarterbacking we’ve seen this century, and probably ever.
Before we get there, let’s back it up to the beginning. Mahomes, a Texas Tech star in college, burst onto the NFL scene in 2018. He took over a good team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and immediately made them great. Best-in-the-league great. Best-show-on-television great. Most-fun-show-on-turf great. Don’t just take my word for it - here’s five and a half minutes of straight lightning coming out of his arm. The first throw - 70 yards in the air on the rope - is only a morsel of what’s to come. You’ve got sidearm daggers. Pinpoint passes on the run. Cheat codes launched across his body 40 yards downfield. Not done? Here’s 13 more minutes of genius.
The highlights translate to winning. That first season, he took his team within a couple inches of the Super Bowl. He led the league in passing, touchdowns, rating - any stat that matters, basically - and won MVP. His second year, he made the Super Bowl and won it. He overcame three double-digit deficits along the way, including a 24-0 deficit to the Texans in a game his team won by 20! The next two years featured frustrating playoff setbacks, even as his team went a combined 26-6 in the regular season and he finished with similar personal statistics.
This year, the Chiefs have the second-best record of the league again. Over these five years, they pace the league with 62 regular season wins. Include postseason success, and they’ve got 70. That number, for context, is 15 clear of the next best team: the Buffalo Bills. Teams can win the Super Bowl without winning that many games in a year. My favorite team, the Chicago Bears, has barely won 15 games in three seasons.
Now football is a team game, right? So how do we know Mahomes is the reason they win? Fair question - let’s look at how much help he gets from his teammates. Unlike Messi or Curry, Mahomes doesn’t play defense. He is at the mercy of his teammates to help him win. The folk saying around the NFL says “defense wins championships” and empirically, there’s a clear correlation between how good your defense is and how often you winning2.
So let’s look at our first “top right” Mahomes graph. I’ve plotted regular season wins against the quality of a team’s defense, measured by their average rank among the league’s 32 squads in DVOA (the most widely accepted statistic of defense quality). He’s in red.
He doesn’t get any help, but he doesn’t need it.
Since coming into the league, Mahomes has been saddled with the 7th worst defense. Those other six teams? They’ve averaged 28 wins in five seasons. He has more than twice that. His main contemporaries he’s often compared to - Josh Allen, Tom Brady, Lamar Jackson - have had much more help. All their defenses rank in the top 10. Only one great QB has had a comparably bad defense, Aaron Rodgers, and he’s got nearly 30% less wins than Mahomes.
Well, you might stubbornly argue, wins still aren’t a QB statistic. They are a team statistic. Other offensive players, the coach, they all play a part. I hear ya. So let’s look at just how good Mahomes is at playing quarterback. We will look at both total impact and efficiency. Is he the best because he runs the most plays, or because he’s the best per play? For total impact, I’ll use passing yards and for efficiency, QBR. The latter is ESPN’s all-in-one, 1-to-100 scale for QB play - it’s football nerd-approved and good enough for me.
The next graph plots every quarterback who’s played at least three of the last five years. Mahomes is once again… fully on his own. Mahomes has one peer in QBR - Drew Brees - and a couple in average yards per season - Justin Herbert and Tom Brady - but none who come remotely close in both.
Quick recap on where we are with Mahomes.
His teams win more than everyone else
He throws for more yards than everyone else
He is more efficient, and effective, throwing than everyone else
He’s the best quarterback of the last five years. By a lot.
But I’ll go a step further.
I re-did that same graph going back even further. ESPN has QBR data dating back to 2006, so I’ve included every five-year quarterbacking run since then. Mahomes’ first five years hold up.
Even here, he’s on the very frontier. The five-year QBR ranks 2nd behind one Peyton Manning run. His yards per season rank 8th - every single one ahead is a different vintage from Drew Brees’ underrated 2007-2017 stretch.
And it should be repeated here: these are his first five years ever playing the position. He did this without the benefit of experience, without “learning the ropes”. He won’t reach his prime for four to five more seasons. Yes, rule changes made it easier to play quarterback, but it is not this easy. The next best 2018-2022 run ranks 66th in QBR.
Still with me? Let’s take it one more step. How does Mahomes’ first five years compare to the best stretches by the best players ever? I’ll use the Hall of Fame to mark the best players - but since that is a lagging indicator (many of the best QBs still play or recently retired), I used Pro Football Reference’s estimates of who will make the Hall of Fame. There are 10 from this era with a case - a who’s who of incredible quarterback play.
And Mahomes pretty much dunks on all of them.
On the “playing QB” stats, he ranks first in yards per attempt, second in QBR, yards, touchdowns, and third in interception rate. On the “winning” stats, he will likely match Brady for the lead over the last two weeks of this season. He is also tied for the most playoff wins with a whole playoffs to go.
What this graph also shows is how hard it is to win in the NFL even with a great quarterback. No QB made the Super Bowl more than twice in these stretches: even the Greatest of All Time (Brady) never did that without significant defensive help. Almost every quarterback averaged less than 1 playoff win per season. Mahomes averages two and counting.
While the data set doesn’t include the greatest QBs who played before 2006, there’s reason to think Mahomes is doing things that haven’t been done in the NFL’s history. Quarterbacks are asked now to do much more than in the prior iterations of the League. Watch games from the ‘80s or ‘90s and you’ll see a totally different spot. Lot more running of the football, lot more rules favoring the defense. There were great quarterbacks and great teams: Terry Bradshaw won four titles in six seasons, Troy Aikman won three in four seasons. But they weren’t doing what Mahomes did.
There’s plenty of time for this to reverse. With two weeks left until the playoffs, a gauntlet awaits Mahomes. The four best QBs in the league all play in his conference, and he may have to beat the three others3 just to make the Super Bowl. He’s again saddled with a shit defense: the Chiefs rank first in offense and 21nd on defense (another point for the importance of defense… the other top 5 teams in the NFL rank 4th, 5th, 1st, and 2nd in defense).
Yet, Mahomes has shown you bet against him at your peril. Like Curry and Messi, he is sui generis. One of one. The revolution himself.
That debate really turns on how you classify “best athlete”. Messi is the best soccer player ever, but would he be even a Division I level athlete at any other sport? Can you say with a straight face he’s a better ‘athlete’ than Bo Jackson, who played multiple professional sports at the top level? More on this another day..
In the data I pulled, the quality of your defense explained about 45% of the variation in your winning percentage (i.e. R^2 was 43%).
In order: Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert.