Denver Broncos: Why it’s not crazy to think they can beat the Chiefs

Interesting stats for Patrick Mahomes

Statistics can often be deceiving. Mahomes leads the NFL with 13 touchdown passes in the first three games of the season including four touchdowns against the Chargers in week one, six against the Steelers in week two, and three against the 49ers this past week. Those numbers are not overly deceiving, they are just evidence of the Chiefs’ offensive superiority over three opponents allowing 31, 30, and 29.7 points per game respectively.

Mahomes’ dominance has come along with zero interceptions and he’s spreading the ball around to the vast array of targets in Kansas City’s offense.

A closer look at the numbers indicates Mahomes has overachieved a little bit in those first three games, which isn’t much of a stretch considering he’s playing absolutely out of his mind. If Kansas City fans are reading this, please don’t take it as a slight to Mahomes. He deserves all the credit in the world and is doing a great job.

But, there are a couple of things to point out.

According to NFL’s Next Gen Stats, Mahomes’ expected completion percentage — his percentage of completed throws based on the catch probability of the throw — is the third-worst in the NFL at just over 61 percent. Mahomes has completed 66.7 percent of his throws this year, meaning many of the throws he’s actually completing are either great plays by his receivers, bad plays by defensive backs, or Mahomes has gotten lucky on more throws than most quarterbacks in the NFL.

The other key stat to know about Mahomes through three games is he has the slowest snap to release time of any quarterback the Broncos will have faced this season (2.82 seconds).

That’s behind Russell Wilson (2.78 seconds), Joe Flacco (2.72 seconds), and Derek Carr (2.49 seconds).

The reason Carr and Flacco had so much success against Denver? Quick triggers. We’re talking about fractions of seconds here, which doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but in the NFL, it’s a huge deal. Again, this is not meant to slight what Mahomes has accomplished thus far, but simply to highlight an area where the Broncos have been exposed (the quick passing game) as an area where Mahomes has not necessarily been strong.