The Patrick Mahomes era begins now for the Kansas City Chiefs

For the Kansas City Chiefs, former 1st round pick Patrick Mahomes takes the reigns as the starting quarterback. What could we expect from him?

What a time to be alive if you’re a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs!

General Manager Brett Veach should be sitting back sipping his favorite drink in celebration of the new era he has ushered in to Kansas City. It began as a fairly normal night in Chiefs Kingdom. Talk around trading Smith was largely in the realm of speculation, with no real momentum just yet. Then, as I was preparing my dinner, the dial got turned up. It went from a safe two or three to a seven or eight as word began to circulate that a trade involving the Chiefs and Washington Redskins was in the works.

The meter took another turn and hit 11 as a trade announcement was made by both teams. The trade won’t be officially cleared until the afternoon of March 14th, per league rules. Regardless of this small wait, Smith has a new team and the Chiefs have a new quarterback. In exchange for Smith, Kansas City grabbed a third round draft pick and cornerback Kendall Fuller. What a steal! Veach, you criminal mastermind.

The big question

The biggest question on my mind right now is “Is Patrick Mahomes ready to do this?” Head coach Andy Reid seems to think that Mahomes has made big enough strides to get on the field. Check out this piece by Terez Paylor at the Kansas City Star to get the latest thoughts from Big Red about Mahomes’ development. The general feeling from the rest of the Arrowhead Addict staff runs in a similar vein. Mahomes is more prepared for this than any other quarterback transition. It’s apparent that Veach thinks its time to hit the ignition with Mahomes, though how much influence he really has over that is unclear.

It was now or never

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What is clear is that the time was now for this trade. When they initially acquired Smith, the Chiefs forked over two second round draft picks to the San Francisco 49ers. Pick any season before this one to attempt a trade and we could not find anything remotely close to that value. If Smith had stayed, his value would have plummeted. This was the opportune moment.

Smith had just come off of one of the best seasons of his career. He was in line for NFL MVP for nearly half of the year. The trade value on this man was never going to be higher, and Veach knew this and jumped on it. While it is possible a bidding war could have yielded something better, this is the kind of deal you remember for ages. Veach killed two birds with one stone by shoring up the defensive backfield and kicking off the Mahomes era. Plus he added some extra draft ammo. This man deserves some serious props.

What can be expected of Mahomes?

The next ask is going to be “What can we expect out of Mahomes in his first full time season?” I’ll do my best and use some super advanced math, intense formulas, and mental acuity off the rgersrts to give a prediction for you. Just kidding, it’s actually easy math but I still need a calculator for it. I’d also like to put it out there that what I do is not official and just an arbitrary set of variables that I picked out myself.

To form a baseline, I am going to draw on the only official stats we have on Mahomes. These are the numbers from his start in the final game of the 2017 season against the Denver Broncos. In that game, he went 22 of 35 passes for 284 yards and one interception. Now isn’t that a little unfair to use a game that he never threw a touchdown in? I’ll get to that, just bear with me.

Rules for the experiment.

-The Broncos game is a baseline

-Taking those numbers, I move up and down 10% alternating every game. I adjusted every number by 10% up or down.

-Every third game, I adjusted his good game numbers up by 15%. Every bad game that fell into the 15% category, I adjusted some up and some down to create a larger disparity in his completion numbers. Believe it or not, but my imperfect method to simulate a bad game would sometimes yield an insanely high completion percentage.

-I picked four games to adjust the given baseline by 25% up or down to reflect two really bad games and two really good games.

-To account for the lack of touchdowns, I used his numbers from all four preseason games to figure out how many passes it took for him to throw a score.

-For interceptions, I took the passes thrown in the whole preseason and the Broncos game and divided that in half. This gave me 38. In my predictions, if Mahomes hits 38 or more attempted passes, he gets an interception.

-In the preseason, Mahomes threw a total of 54 passes and four scores. This gives a rough estimate of scoring once every 14 throws. I’ll use this average to tally up his touchdowns.

-There is a bit of rounding mixed throughout so that there is a bit of discrepancy and the ratios don’t remain constant throughout. That would be pointless.

-Here are the categories of games that emerged:

10% Good

10% Bad

15% Good

15% Bad

25% Good

25% Bad

Number crunching

A little bit of math later and the results look something like this:

Game 1: 24 of 38 for 312 yards and one touchdown. (10% Good)

Game 2: 19 of 31 for 256 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. (10% Bad)

Game 3: 26 of 40 for 327 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. (15% Good)

Game 4: 28 of 44 for 355 yards, three touchdowns, and one interception. (25% Good)

Game 5: 17 of 35 for 227 yards, one score and two interceptions. (25% Bad)

Game 6: 18 of 40 for 241 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. (15% Bad)

Please remember that this is all an arbitrary selection of numbers and rules to have a little fun with the prediction process.

The final result winds up at:

361 of 609 passes for 4,686 yards, 22 touchdowns, and 17 interceptions. Not a bad prediction based off of the given numbers and some arbitrary rules if you ask me!

Next season is going to be a blast

Now that we’ve gotten through all the math, I’ll ease you out. Next season is going to be super fun to watch. Mahomes will be unleashed in his full power on the NFL, which will hopefully translate to big wins and postseason success for the loyal Addicts in Chiefs Kingdom. What do you think of the trade? Do you think Mahomes is ready? Thanks for reading and Go Chiefs!

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