Patrick Lavon Mahomes is your 2022 MVP

The latest from the sports data science guy at KC Sports Network, Joseph Hefner

Patrick Mahomes is the MVP this year. There is no question about it. He’s been the MVP since Hurts was injured, and frankly should have been even before that. He’s played at an absurd level all season, and all his challengers have dropped off.

Do you remember the narrative from this offseason? This has been largely forgotten, but in an offseason where everyone else in the AFC loaded up to take them down, the Kansas City Chiefs traded their best wide receiver away.

The Chiefs were going to be a wildcard team, if they were lucky, remember? The Chargers were going to win the West, if they could just hold off the Broncos. And the Raiders looked like they might be frisky. The Bills landed Von Miller.

The whole offseason of narratives have been forgotten, because the Chiefs offense hasn’t missed a beat. Yes, it’s looked different. It’s more shorter throws and yards after catch than previous years. It’s far more diverse too. Mahomes has thrown touchdowns to 11 different players. He’s completed passes to 16 different players, including himself.

This iteration of Mahomes has actually been the best he’s been since 2019. Mahomes has more passing yards and touchdowns than he’s had since his previous MVP in 2018. His EPA/play is the same as 2019, the year he won the Super Bowl MVP. All those narratives have been forgotten, because Mahomes wiped them away.

Check out this graphic. This is a chart of Mahomes career EPA, with a rolling EPA that averages the previous 250 dropbacks or QB runs. You can see his season average EPA, and how it’s varied over time. 2022 looks a lot like 2019 and 2020, doesn’t it?

The slump in 2019 corresponded with him being injured and playing some bad teams, where KC historically doesn’t try too hard on offense. This year, our schedule ended with 5 bad teams, and we have looked asleep during some drives in those games. I think it will pick up going into the playoffs.

I also took a look at what the NFL MVP has been historically, to see if I could find anything that sticks out about what the MVP voters looks for. Here’s a graphic of every MVP since 2000. I want to point out a couple things here.

A QB has won the award in 18 of the last 22 years. A QB will win it this year. Since 2002, in every year except 2015, the QB who won the MVP was the league leader in EPA per dropback or was named Peyton Manning. While I don’t think that the AP MVP voters care too much about EPA as a stat, it seems clear that EPA/dropback is measuring something that the voters DO care about.

In addition to this, any time the MVP wasn’t the league leader in EPA/dropback, his team was the #1 seed in his conference. Or it was Peyton Manning, who seems to have been graded on a curve for MVP voters.

Patrick Mahomes is leading the league in EPA/dropback, and the Chiefs, with a win vs the Raiders on Saturday, lock up the #1 seed. More than that, Mahomes biggest competitors have significantly worse EPA/dropback. Here’s the numbers:

EPA/Dropback by QBs (total EPA):

Mahomes: 0.29 (211)

Allen: 0.23 (157)

Hurts: 0.20 (124)

Burrow: 0.18 (123)

Mahomes has been significantly better and more consistent than any of the other top QB’s here. In addition, he’s added an extra 54 expected points over his biggest competitor. That’s a lot of extra value over the second best QB in the league.

By leading in EPA/dropback, and winning vs the Raiders to lock in the 1 seed, Mahomes will have fulfilled both the primary and the secondary requirements for the award. Plus, his initials are PM, just like Peyton’s, so he even kinda fulfills the tertiary requirement! What more can one man do to earn the MVP?

Patrick Mahomes absolutely deserves the MVP. And he’ll be getting it on February 9th at the NFL Honors show in Phoenix. Congratulations, Pat!!