Kansas City’s rebuilt wide receiver corps can make Chiefs unstoppable

Chiefs Receiver Production This Season

The Chiefs are now seven games into this season. That’s a decent amount of games, so let’s look at the receiving numbers so far. To keep things simple, I’ll keep the receiver rushing numbers out of these stat lines. Listed below are KC’s seven games with the total wide receiver catches, yards, and touchdowns for each game.

• Week 1 – 44-21 win @ Arizona Cardinals: 14 – 169 – 1
• Week 2 – 27-24 win vs Los Angeles Chargers: 10 – 122- 1
• Week 3 – 20-17 loss @ Indianapolis Colts: 10 – 139 – 0
• Week 4 – 41-31 win @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers: 11 – 144 -0
• Week 5 – 30-29 win vs Las Vegas Raiders: 16 – 221 – 0
• Week 6 – 24-20 loss vs Buffalo Bills: 9 – 179 – 2
• Week 7 – 44-23 win @ San Francisco 49ers – 15 – 271 – 3

First off, the Chiefs do have slightly better wide receiver per-game averages in their five wins (13.2 receptions, 185.4 yards, 1 TD) than they do in their two losses (9.5 receptions, 159 yards, 1 touchdown). However, I don’t know if that’s the most interesting and encouraging thing we can take away from looking at the game-by-game breakdown.

If you look at that list, the three biggest receiver yardage totals have come over the last three games and five of their seven total receiver touchdowns have come in the last three games as well. In other words, the new receiving group is starting to pick up steam. If we take the average wide receiver production in KC’s first four games and compare it to the average receiver production of the past three games you can see a pretty significant uptick.

Average Total Receiver Production:

First Four Games: 11.3 receptions, 143.5 yards, 0.5 touchdowns
Last Three Games: 13.3 receptions, 223.7 yards, 1.7 touchdowns

While the total receiver receptions may only be up by two receptions per game, the yardage and touchdown production increase is significant. The Chiefs are averaging almost 80 more receiver yards per game these past three games and have more than three times the touchdowns. In the first four games, the average wideout reception only went for about 12.7 yards. Over the past three games, the average reception by a wideout has gone for 16.8 yards. Mahomes is starting to trust his new wideout group down the field more and the production shows it. That’s incredibly encouraging for the offense as the season goes on.

So how does this year’s wide receiver production compare to last season? I’m glad you asked.