Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is going to have a tough time staying on track with his incredible statistical totals so far.
The single most exciting story in the entire National Football League has been a dream come true for Kansas City Chiefs fans. The emergence of first-year starter Patrick Mahomes has set the NFL abuzz with his tremendous, well, everything. The Chiefs are 2-0 because of it and the team’s own Super Bowl odds have shot through the roof in response.
Mahomes, if you haven’t been watching, is torching every stadium he’s visiting on the way out, like some ancient sack-and-pillage treatment of enemy villages from centuries before. With 10 touchdowns and 0 interceptions, he’s finding every open target on the field for the Chiefs, moving the chains with ease and maximizing every scoring opportunity provided to him.
But that number, as great as it sounds, has also established a bar. Ten touchdowns in two games. Twitter was repeating the same projections ad nauseum, as if everyone was so proud they’d come up with the exact same idea as everyone else—namely, every Chiefs analyst was stating that Mahomes was projected to throw 80 touchdowns on the season. Eighty. That’s insane.
More from Arrowhead Addict
- Former Chiefs cornerback in legal trouble in Las Vegas
- Chiefs Kingdom: Get ready to break contract news
- Chiefs news: Travis Kelce wants to host fan ‘chug-off’ in Germany
- Podcast: Breaking down the Chiefs biggest roster battles
- KC Chiefs send Dave Merritt to NFL coaching accelerator
Everyone knows this, of course. When your projections take you 25 touchdowns over the regular season record, you realize that sample size comes into play. Two games is not a safe platform on which to stand and make a case. It’s silly to project anyone’s stats after two games, especially a player with no previous record to compare it with. No one can keep that up.
Right?
That’s the slight bit of hope that we’re all maintaining because, if we’re honest, we’ve never seen this before. The touch, the confidence, the emotional base line, the zip, the vision, the decision-making—it’s all come packaged as this overwhelming yet unexpected gift. We’re not quite sure what to do with something so valuable.
So how realistic is it for Mahomes to keep up his current run. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers. At least that feels like something we can trust.
In NFL history, 37 different quarterbacks have put together consecutive games of 4 or more touchdown passes. It’s been done a total of 58 times (once by Len Dawson, seven times by Peyton Manning). Only three of those instances reached a third game. Only two reached a fourth, and only Manning was able to stretch that to five consecutive games.
In other words, per NFL history, Mahomes has a 5.2 percent chance of making it to three games of 4 touchdown passes.
That list includes some of the NFL’s all-time greats. Manning and Dawson along with Johnny Unitas, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberg, Warren Moon, Kurt Warner, Drew Brees, Dan Marino, Brett Favre and more. More often than not, the ability to put up 4 touchdowns in consecutive games is a signal that a franchise quarterback is in place.
But that list is not without its outliers, and in fact there are several of them. Billy Volek had 8 touchdowns and 1 interception in two straight starts back in 2004 for the Tennessee Titans. Robert Griffin III, Tommy Kramer, Jeff Garcia, Jake Plummer, Craig Morton and Jay Cutler have all done the same. At this point, I am pretty sure Chiefs Kingdom would be very frustrated if Mahomes turned out to be like any of these names instead of the previous list.
Let’s pan the camera back a bit, just to get a couple more games under Mahomes’ belt. Let’s project him to throw three touchdowns in each of the next two games—that’s half of the touchdown passes he threw against the Steelers. If Mahomes is able to put up three touchdown passes against the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos in Weeks 3 and 4, respectively, he will be No. 41 in NFL history to do so—to throw 3 touchdowns (again, just half of what he had) in four consecutive games.
This is a very telling statistic, I believe. Three touchdowns is not an insane number and even horrible quarterbacks have had a stellar game here or there marked by that very number. But the ability to consistently get in the end zone through the air is not an easy thing in the NFL. Consider all of the quarterbacks in all of NFL history: only 40 times has someone put together a quarter season with 3 touchdowns in each game.
That’s insane, to me, because it doesn’t seem like that much. It sounds like a hot streak, like a baseball player hitting a home run in 3 consecutive games or a basketball player scoring 40 points per in the same stretch. But it’s not. It’s rare company. Health, fatigue, accuracy, opportunity—they all come into play to keep most quarterbacks from ever putting up touchdowns with such regularity.
The basic question is this: will Patrick Mahomes come back to earth? NFL history says yes because no one, even the best, can sustain the performance he’s putting on two games into his first year as a starter. However those same numbers signal that he could be destined for true greatness. At this point only time will tell.