The Routes Mahomes Targets

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner.

I feel like I’ve written a version of this article a number of times this year. The Chiefs offense looks much different this year than it has any other year of the Patrick Mahomes era. We just beat our bitter foes, the Cincinnati Bengals, with a pared down offense, because our receiving corps can’t be trusted with a full Andy Reid playbook.

The nflverse recently added some of Next Gen Stats data fields to their datasets, and it has been a glorious last couple of weeks playing with it. One of the data fields it provides is the route that the targeted receiver ran. That means we can see what routes Mahomes likes to target, in addition to what routes our WR’s typically get targets on.

It’s more useful for QB’s than WR’s, since it only gives us target data, and a WR might run 30 routes, but only get 5 targets. Quarterbacks, though, are the ones providing those targets, and thus every pass is a data point for the quarterback.