Just how good is Alex Smith for the Kansas City Chiefs?

Alex Smith is currently on pace to throw for 4952 yards with 40 touchdowns and zero interceptions while completing over 77% of his passes at 9.8 yards per attempt. I don’t care if you’re president of the Alex Smith fan club and have his face tattooed on your chest, you still aren’t expecting him to be THAT good all season long. So the question isn’t actually “Can he keep this up?” because we know the answer is no. The real question is if these two games have been a statistical anomaly or if they are a sign of him legitimately upping his game this season.

Alex Smith’s career high for yards in a season was set last year at 3,502. If Smith starts the final fourteen games this season he would only need to average 206 yards per game to top that mark. That certainly seems reasonable. Last season Smith averaged about 241 yards/start in the 14 games where he played the entire game. If Smith were to average that over the remaining 14 games and you added the 619 yards he already has that would give him 3993 yards for the season. That number would have ranked him 14th in the NFL last season, right between Eli Manning and David Carr. Last season of the 13 quarterbacks that had more yards than that, only two of them (Matt Ryan and Drew Brees) had a higher completion percentage than Smith’s 67.1% from last season (and he’s a full 10% ahead of that through two games in 2017).

If Smith can get his passing production up into the top half of the league while maintaining his exceptional accuracy and minimal turnovers, I can absolutely see him being in high demand even if the touchdown numbers do drop off. Given the fact that Smith has only thrown 20 touchdowns twice in his entire NFL career you would guess that realistically its hard to project him throwing much more than 25-26 touchdowns but that would still be a career high.

So, I am going to set the following line as my expectation if Smith continues to play at what would be a career year level.

69% completions, 3,900 yards, 7.7 yards/attempt, 26 touchdowns, 7 interceptions

That would be by far Alex Smith’s best season of his NFL career but without being completely unrealistic.

That brings us to the second question.