Is Patrick Mahomes the most underrated player in the NFL? | Yahoo Fantasy Football Forecast

Yahoo Sports’ Matt Harmon and Charles McDonald discuss the immediate impact of Patrick Mahomes' play since becoming the Chiefs' starting QB in 2018.

Video Transcript

- Let's talk about Kansas City here real quick before we get out of here. This is another team I think that out-kicked a lot of expectations, which is weird to say. But I mean, how many times did you see, like, a division preview of the AFC West, and it's like, oh man, the Chiefs finished fourth in their division. They trade away Tyreek Hill. Well, they were just the best passing offense in the NFL this year.

- Yeah, that's why I was able to ride the dumbest take of all time.

- The greatest take of all time.

- It's the best dumbest take ever. Patrick Mahomes is the most underrated player in football because I-- first, I just had that take because the NFL Top 100 came out, and he was like number eight. And I was like, that's way too low. That's way too low.

- [INAUDIBLE]

- At the time, it was like, he can be 1, or he can be 2. And the other one can be Aaron Donald. Like--

- Yeah.

- --that's it. It's those-- at the time coming into the season, it was those two guys. And I just felt like people really underestimated how much better Patrick Mahomes is than every other quarterback in the league. And this year, I don't think there's any better proof than what he did this year.

I mean, just absolutely burned the league down again. Tyreek Hill's out.

Travis Kelce was still great, but when you look at they just their wideouts, they didn't have like a true dominant number one guy out there like they did with Tyreek. And the difficult part of losing someone like Tyreek is there's a target vacuum now. Like, he's saw the same quarterback, still got a lot of the same pieces around, but Tyreek's gone.

So other guys are going to have to step up on the fly because anytime Patrick Mahomes is your quarterback, you're expected to be here at the Super Bowl. So you don't have time to, like, waste a year to try and figure out X, Y, and Z and how he can put this together. But when you have 15 back there, you can do anything. Like, you and me could go out there, and maybe we could score 20 points with Patrick Mahomes at our quarterback.

- I don't know. With your--

- And my--

- With your back and my knee, I've got to take the under on 20 points.

- It might be a little tough, but it's just-- the funniest thing to me when you go on Twitter right now and anyone posts a graph about quarterback efficiency, right?

- Oh yeah.

- There's just a line of red that is so far ahead of anyone else. I mean, someone posted today his, like, EPA per attempt against top five pass defenses. And he is so--

- It's ridiculous.

- He's, like, playing at a Pro Bowl level against even the best defenses that you can see in the league. So, he's different, man. Like, he's just a different breed of quarterback. Makes no sense.

- And it's OK to say that and, like, recognize that it's still pretty early in his career. I mean, he's like, what, 26, 27, something like that at this point. But we are seeing something different. We are seeing something-- I don't want to say unprecedented. But I mean, just from like what he's-- it kind of is.

- It kind of is.

- Yeah, I know, I know. It's wild. I mean, like, whether he'll ever have the same amount of success from a Super Bowl standpoint as Brady-- but he's been to five straight AFC Championship games. This will be his third Super Bowl, and he didn't even start his first season.

- Yeah. Every year that Patrick Mahomes has started the Chiefs are at minimum coming within one game of the Super Bowl. Like--

- Yeah.

- --I know that we tend to-- the way that I think Americans look at sports media, it tends to be like, it's almost as bad as getting-- like, getting to the game and losing is almost as bad as, like, not getting there at all.

- Yeah.

- But when you have a chance to play for Super Bowls that often, no one else is doing that.

- Right.

- It's five straight AFC Championship games. Like, this is like some video game [BLEEP]. Like, it makes no sense. I watch him, and I'm blown away. You know, the throw that he had last week to [INAUDIBLE] on the goal line against--

- Oh yeah.

- --the Bengals. And he's just like-- he's moving around in the pocket. And he looks up, and he just drills him right in the chest. Like, that is-- it's different.

- It's different.

- It's special. So, to the people who are like, if you're already getting bored of this Patrick Mahomes thing, you got to buckle in, man. Like--

- This is going to be a long ride.

- We could conceivably be doing this for the next 15 years. So, buckle in.

- Shoot, if we're doing this for 15 years, I feel pretty good about it.

- Me too.

- Yeah, that'd be awesome.

- Yeah.

- And you mentioned MVS. Like, the collection of receivers around him, you know, obviously it's a huge deal to lose a guy like Tyreek Hill-- not only the production of the target vacuum that you mentioned but just the way that teams defend the offense as a whole. Like, nobody saw more man coverage early in the season than the Chiefs' wide receivers. And it's like, these guys ended up, you know, between MVS, Skyy Moore, and JuJu Smith-Schuster, like, they had like 1,800 yards or whatever. But from an on field impact perspective, it's clear, like, who's doing the elevating here, and that's what I think makes this season so special from him and why going to win MVP and why he could take home a second Super Bowl here.

- Yeah, he's hit LeBron status. He should win MVP every single year until he retires. But he won't.

- No, obviously.

- There will be fatigue, but like I said a million times now, he's different.