The Kansas City Chiefs are playing what their fans recognize as Chiefs football again, and Patrick Mahomes decision to try riskier throws is a big part of the reason.
Those throws aren’t necessarily “bombs away” tosses, either. The threat of having speedy receivers like Xavier Worthy back in the lineup is preventing offenses from jumping the shorter routes, which helps a lot. These throws are still risky, but Jesse Newell of The Athletic showed how this works in a recent article.
The example Newell used was a touchdown pass to receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster that resulted in a touchdown against the Baltimore Ravens last week. The receiver was immediately sandwiched by two Ravens defenders, but the timing and the route were on point, which allowed Mahomes to make the throw.
“JuJu ran the route perfectly,” Mahomes said, “and so I was ready to throw on time.”
The quarterback has talked about this a lot lately, with Mahomes talking a lot about trust.
“The opportunities that are there, he’s gonna throw the ball,” Smith-Schuster said in the locker room Thursday. “Let us do our thing and just make plays.”
The deep plays are part of the formula again, too. Mahomes is taking his shots to he point where his average depth of target has increased by nearly two years per attempt.
The fact that he’s throwing more in tight windows is harder to measure, but there’s evidence that that’s happening, too. According to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, Mahomes threw into tight windows just over ten percent of the time, with a tight window defined as a throw where the receivers has a yard or less of separation.
This year he’s up to just over 14 percent, which has pushed him from last in the league last year to 19th out of 33 quarterbacks. It’s also the highest number of his career, although that speaks more to the quality of the receiver Mahomes has early in his career, when the Chiefs frequently won high-scoring, track-meet games.
The most amazing stat in all this is that the Chiefs aren’t turning the ball over, despite the risk. They have just one in four games, but they face a tougher challenge Jacksonville this week.
“They’re causing the turnovers. It’s not like the turnovers are just happening,” Mahomes said of the Jaguars. “They’re punching the football out, they’re tipping passes, they’re intercepting the football when they get their hands on it. So it’ll be a great challenge for us.”