Player
Patrick Mahomes
QB · KC Chiefs
Total-points finishes punish absence twice: once in the missing games and again in draft-day perception the following summer. Mahomes at an ADP of 100.6 is priced off the QB11 total, but rate stats are what carry forward, and his 20.4 per game was built on career-high rushing production, not a passing outlier that has to repeat.
The 6-11 paradox
KC went 6-11 and Mahomes quietly had his best fantasy season per game since 2022.
AnomalyQB fantasy points per game, 2025 (PPR, minimum 8 games)
| Rank | QB | Games | PPR/game |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Josh Allen | 16 | 22.8 |
| 2 | Drake Maye | 17 | 20.7 |
| 3 | Matthew Stafford | 17 | 20.6 |
| 4 | Patrick Mahomes | 14 | 20.4 |
| 5 | Trevor Lawrence | 17 | 19.9 |
The season-long leaderboard says Mahomes finished as the QB11 in total PPR points. The per-game leaderboard says he was the QB4 (20.4 per game), one spot behind Stafford and ahead of every quarterback in his draft range. The gap is three missed games: he did not play after week 15, and the counting stats never caught up. Fantasy drafters price the QB11. The tape and the rate stats paid like a top-5 quarterback.
Why it matters. Total-points finishes punish absence twice: once in the missing games and again in draft-day perception the following summer. Mahomes at an ADP of 100.6 is priced off the QB11 total, but rate stats are what carry forward, and his 20.4 per game was built on career-high rushing production, not a passing outlier that has to repeat.
At age 30, Mahomes just posted the best rushing season of his career. It was not close.
TrendMahomes rushing by season (regular season)
| Season | Games | Rush yds/game | Rush TD |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 15 | 20.5 | 2 |
| 2021 | 17 | 22.4 | 2 |
| 2022 | 17 | 21.1 | 4 |
| 2023 | 16 | 24.3 | 0 |
| 2024 | 16 | 19.2 | 2 |
| 2025 | 14 | 30.1 | 5 |
Eight seasons of 15-to-24 rushing yards per game, then a jump to 30.1 per game and 5 rushing touchdowns in 2025, both career highs, at an age when most pocket passers are slowing down. The league-average QB managed 14.6 rushing yards per game in 2025; Mahomes doubled it. With the deep passing game diminished, he started taking the yards himself, and the fantasy scoring followed: rushing is why his per-game production rose while his passing counting stats fell.
Why it matters. A quarterback who adds 10 rushing yards per game and 3 extra rushing scores adds roughly 2.5 PPR points per game without throwing a single additional touchdown. The question for 2026 is whether the rushing spike is a new phase of his game or a one-year improvisation. The scale of the jump, and the fact that it came from more scrambling rather than a redesigned run package, suggests it travels.
When Mahomes takes off, it is worth 74 times what a normal KC snap is worth.
SplitKC offense, 2025 regular season
| Play | Plays | EPA/play |
|---|---|---|
| Mahomes scramble | 52 | +0.592 |
| Everything else (pass/run) | 996 | +0.008 |
Highest EPA per scramble, 2018-2025 (minimum 150 scrambles)
| Rank | QB | Scrambles | EPA/scramble |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Josh Allen | 356 | +0.760 |
| 2 | Patrick Mahomes | 322 | +0.716 |
| 3 | Justin Fields | 201 | +0.607 |
| 4 | Jalen Hurts | 244 | +0.567 |
Mahomes scrambled a career-high 52 times in 14 games in 2025 and averaged 8.1 yards and +0.592 EPA per scramble, against +0.008 EPA on every other Kansas City offensive snap. Across 2018-2025 only Josh Allen has produced more per scramble among high-volume scramblers. The broken play has quietly become the best play in the Kansas City offense.
Why it matters. Scrambles are the one play a defense cannot scheme against, because nobody calls them. As the designed passing game has gotten harder for KC to sustain, Mahomes' escape-hatch production has become a larger share of the offense's value, and in 2025 it was carrying an otherwise league-average unit. It is also the direct source of the career-high rushing line that boosted his fantasy scoring.
The arm, audited
The clean-pocket era is over: Mahomes' sack rate has nearly doubled in two years.
TrendMahomes sack rate by season
| Season | Sacks | Sack rate |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 17 | 3.4% |
| 2021 | 28 | 4.1% |
| 2023 | 27 | 4.3% |
| 2024 | 36 | 5.8% |
| 2025 | 34 | 6.3% |
Lowest sack rate, 2018-2025 (minimum 2,000 attempts)
| Rank | QB | Sack rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tom Brady | 3.4% |
| 2 | Patrick Mahomes | 4.4% |
| 3 | Jared Goff | 4.9% |
| 4 | Josh Allen | 5.3% |
For six seasons Mahomes lived between 3.4% and 4.3%, and his career mark since 2018 (4.4%) is still second only to Tom Brady among high-volume passers. Then 2024 hit 5.8% and 2025 hit 6.3%, both far above anything from his prime. Part of the 2025 spike is self-inflicted, holding the ball to hunt scrambles, but a two-year climb this steep is protection erosion, not style.
Why it matters. Sack avoidance was a quiet pillar of Mahomes' durability and of KC's offensive floor: sacks end drives and get quarterbacks hurt. A 6.3% rate on 500-plus dropbacks is roughly 15 extra sacks a season versus his prime baseline. It is also entangled with the scramble surge that is now feeding his fantasy value, which makes it a trade he is choosing as much as a decline he is suffering.
The ledger and the price
Five Super Bowl trips in seven seasons. Then the first year of his career with no playoffs at all.
RareKansas City's Super Bowls in the Mahomes era
| Season | Result |
|---|---|
| 2019 | W 31-20 vs SF |
| 2020 | L 9-31 vs TB |
| 2022 | W 38-35 vs PHI |
| 2023 | W 25-22 vs SF |
| 2024 | L 22-40 vs PHI |
From 2018 through 2024, Kansas City reached five Super Bowls in seven seasons and won three. Then 2025 delivered the whiplash: 6-11, no playoffs, the first season of Mahomes' starting career without a postseason game. The franchise that had played in late February almost every year watched January from home.
Why it matters. The rarity is the contrast itself: dynasty runs almost never end with a thud this abrupt while the quarterback is still productive. KC's 2025 collapse was concentrated in one-score games rather than in Mahomes' own play, which is why one bad season, however jarring, reads more like an interruption than an ending. How he responds to the first truly empty January of his career is the 2026 storyline.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: quarterbacks who run it in like this stay top-12. Mahomes at pick 100 is the discount.
Mahomes 2025: the qualifying profile
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Games | 14 |
| Carries per game | 4.6 |
| Rushing TDs | 5 |
| PPR points per game | 20.4 (QB4) |
QBs with 10+ games, 3.5+ carries/game, 4+ rush TDs, 1999-2024: the next season
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Seasons in cohort | 81 |
| Avg rush TDs the next year | 4.6 |
| Kept 3+ rush TDs | 58 of 81 |
| Finished top-12 in PPR/game | 55 of 81 |
| Finished top-8 in PPR/game | 44 of 81 |
Mahomes' 2025 profile, a real carry floor plus five rushing scores plus top-5 per-game scoring, matches a cohort of 81 QB seasons since 1999. The year after, those quarterbacks averaged 4.6 rushing touchdowns and 55 of 81 finished top-12 in PPR points per game. The gradeable call: Mahomes finishes top-12 in PPR points per game in 2026, with top-8 the likelier-than-not outcome, against an ADP of 100.6 that prices him as the QB11 total from a 14-game season.
Why it matters. The market is pricing last year's total points; the cohort prices the profile. Rushing production is the most valuable stat in fantasy quarterbacking and, for QBs with an established carry floor, one of the stickier ones, because the scramble rate and goal-line usage belong to the player and the scheme, not to variance. Add the likely rebound of the team around him and the round-9 price is paying for the one version of Mahomes that no longer exists: the pure pocket passer.
Half of first-round quarterbacks bust. Pick 10 of 2017 became the century's biggest hit rate outlier.
ComparisonMahomes vs the first-round QB baseline
| Measure | First-round QBs (1999-2022) | Mahomes |
|---|---|---|
| Startable seasons in first 4 years | roughly half never get one | 3 (2018-2020) |
| Top-12 PPR/game seasons since 2018 | n/a | 8 of 8 through 2025 |
| Super Bowl trips | most: 0 | 5 |
The law across 69 first-round quarterbacks from 1999-2022: about half never produce even one top-12 fantasy season in their first four years. Mahomes cleared the bar in his first season as a starter with the highest-scoring QB season of 2018 (417.1 PPR points) and has finished top-4 in points per game in 2025 despite the roster around him cratering. Draft capital said he was a coin flip. He landed on the edge and stayed there.
Why it matters. The first-round QB miss rate is the sober context for how the position gets priced, in real drafts and fantasy ones: premium picks at quarterback fail at rates that would get a receiver scout fired. That is what makes an eight-for-eight run of startable seasons so structurally rare, and it reframes his 2025 ADP slide: the market is treating the safest quarterback profile of the century as if he carried rookie-grade risk again.
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