Buffalo Rumblings
When stat scouring the Buffalo Bills’ Week 9 win over the Kansas City Chiefs, there was a lot of clamor regarding quarterback Patrick Mahomes having his first sub-50% completion rate of his career (44%). Mahomes completed a scant 15 passes on 34 attempts. Josh Allen on the other hand set a Bills franchise record for completion percentage, doubling Mahomes with 88% with 23 completions on 26 attempts. It gets even weirder than that though.
Despite completing over 50% more passes than Mahomes (23 vs. 15), Josh Allen only had 23 more yards than Patrick Mahomes. That’s right, the passing volume was remarkably close. That’s because Mahomes and the Chiefs went almost entirely boom or bust.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with these charts and don’t feel like reading the included key, the white dots (over half the passes in this case) are incomplete. And for those of you who don’t want to work out the math on those, if you add up all of those incomplete passes the grand total is zero yards contributed to Mahomes’ 250 on the day.
All that is my “jerk” way of saying we’re looking at the green dots. Yes there are some green dots in the short zones, including four completions behind the line of scrimmage and another three within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. Now I know what you’re thinking. What’s the NFL average for yards per completion? It happens to be 10.8 yards, which might be why I delineated my first paragraph to discuss passes at the 10-yard-or-shorter mark.
So if seven of his completions were short of 10 yards, that means his other eight passes were beyond that mark. Let’s discuss the passes beyond 10 yards then. Four passes fell between 15-20 yards. Four passes went beyond 20 yards, three of those were over 25 and two of that group was 30-plus.
When the dust settled, Mahomes’ yards per completion against Buffalo was 16.6 yards, well and truly above average. Put differently, when Mahomes was completing a pass, there was a good shot it was “boom.” The big caveat there is “when” completing a pass. As noted above, more often than not they hit the turf or Maxwell Hairston’s hands.
Let’s do a little compare and contrast though.
There’s very little boom here. Also close to zero bust. I think one of the incomplete passes had to have been a throwaway, because I don’t see a third white dot on the chart (correct me if I’m wrong, the two I’m referring to are middle of the field, four yards and 13 yards).
I think it’s very clear how different these charts are. Let’s get a little weirder then. Josh Allen’s yards per completion was 10.5 yards. Almost perfectly average. Allen’s distribution was quite typical of the league, making the difference with Mahomes all the more glaring. Kansas City appears to have deliberately shot for the moon,...
