It’s that time of year once again! Football Absurdity will bring you a breakdown of every notable fantasy football-relevant player throughout June, July, and August. We start off with the quarterbacks. It wasn’t that long ago that we thought that Patrick Mahomes would sit atop the quarterback fantasy football ranks for the foreseeable future, and now he seems to be headed in the wrong direction. Can we trust him in 2022?
Patrick Mahomes ADP and AAV:
Average Draft Position: QB2, Pick 33 Overall
Average Auction Value: $14.6
Patrick Mahomes Statistics:
| Year | G | GS | Att | Comp | Comp% | Yds | TD | Int | Comp/G | Att/G | Yds/G | TD/G | INT/G |
| 2021 | 17 | 17 | 436 | 658 | 66.3% | 4839 | 37 | 13 | 25.6 | 38.7 | 284.6 | 2.2 | 0.8 |
| 2020 | 15 | 15 | 588 | 390 | 66.3% | 4740 | 38 | 6 | 39.2 | 26.0 | 316.0 | 2.5 | 0.4 |
| 2019 | 14 | 14 | 484 | 319 | 65.9% | 4031 | 26 | 5 | 34.6 | 22.8 | 287.9 | 1.9 | 0.4 |
| Year | 4 PPTD | 6 PPTD | 4 PPTD/G | 6 PPTD/G | Year | Att | Yd | TD | YPC | Att/G | Yd/G | |
| 2021 | 361.7 | 435.7 | 21.3 | 25.63 | 2021 | 66 | 381 | 2 | 5.8 | 3.9 | 22.4 | |
| 2020 | 374.4 | 450.4 | 25.0 | 30.03 | 2020 | 62 | 308 | 2 | 5.0 | 4.1 | 20.5 | |
| 2019 | 287 | 339 | 20.5 | 24.21 | 2019 | 43 | 218 | 2 | 5.1 | 3.1 | 15.6 |
| Year | Air Yards | aDOT | aDOT+ | Y/A | TD% | INT% | Sacks | Yds/Sack |
| 2021 | 4825 | 7.33 | 7.33 | 7.40 | 8.5% | 3.0% | 28 | 5.21 |
| 2020 | 4644 | 7.88 | 0.15 | 8.06 | 6.5% | 1.0% | 22 | 6.68 |
| 2019 | 4259 | 8.80 | 0.62 | 8.33 | 5.4% | 1.0% | 17 | 7.47 |
aDOT+ represents a player’s depth of target compared to the league average for that season. Air yards data is from FTNFantasy.com/air-yards. The remainder of the statistics are per Pro-Football-Reference.com
2022 Patrick Mahomes Fantasy Football Overview:
2021 felt like a weird step back for Patrick Mahomes. From 2018 to 2020, 42% of Mahomes’ games finished with him in the top five, with just 29% of his games having him fall out of the top twelve at quarterback. Then, things went a little haywire in 2021. The Chiefs struggled with handling basic offensive tasks at times, and Mahomes’ top-two upside evaporated alongside it; Patrick Mahomes finished as a top-five quarterback six times, just one more time than he finished outside the top twelve. This made Mahomes a week winner about as often as he actively hurt your fantasy team in 2021. And it didn’t really have much to do with an overall Chiefs’ downturn, as they scored 28.24 points per game in 2021 compared to 28.9 in 2019 and 2020 combined.
I’m not really sure where Patrick Mahomes’ fantasy points went if we’re being quite honest. It’s just a little bit here (0.3 fewer touchdowns per game, 0.36 more interceptions per game, 31.4 fewer passing yards—1.3 fantasy points—per game). There wasn’t one thing you could really point to that changed with Mahomes that led to his step back, but it was instead a conglomeration of things that conspired to lead to a setback for Mahomes…
2022 Patrick Mahomes Fantasy Football Draft Strategy:
Patrick Mahomes Auction Value: $12
Draft Ranking: Find out for your league settings in a Beersheet! (coming in early July)
…And that’s exactly why I am out on Patrick Mahomes. There’s nothing really to point to as a reason why he wasn’t a top-two quarterback in 2021. Instead, it was a bunch of stuff that just wasn’t really as good as it had been in the past. And don’t get me wrong, Peak Patrick Mahomes still exists (he had 11 touchdowns and 1,057 passing yards in three playoff games) but it seems to be fewer and further between. Mahomes started the year with six games of multiple touchdowns games, then he had one or fewer touchdowns in five of his next six games, before bouncing back. It was a lot of up-and-down, and a lot of uncertainty last year.
And the uncertainty gets worse in 2022, which underscores why I’m out on Mahomes in 2022. Read this whole thing again, not once did I mention that Mahomes lost Tyreek Hill, and replaced him with Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster. There’s no certainty left in the Chiefs’ passing game, and at pick 33 or the same going price as Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert, I can’t see myself ending up with Patrick Mahomes without doing so at a steep discount.
Best Case Scenario:
The deeper wide receiver corps helps Mahomes return to his former glory and he finishes with 50 touchdowns and 5,000 passing yards, as QB1.
Worst Case Scenario:
Jackson Mahomes, Brittany Mahomes, and JuJu Smith-Schuster sign a TikTok deal to be the official dance team for Justin Herbert.
Check out all our 2022 player profiles, here.
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[Header Image Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Patrick_Mahomes_II.JPG, cropped, under CC SA 4.0]
