If you haven’t already noticed, the Chiefs offense and Patrick Mahomes are in a bit of a funk – and the problem is more than just dropped passes this season (although that’s definitely not helping the situation, either). Through 13 weeks of the fantasy regular season, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce still rank among the league’s best in terms of fantasy points per game - but they haven’t dominated at the level we’ve grown accustomed to seeing them dominate over the past few years.
So far through 13 games, Patrick Mahomes is averaging 19.3 fantasy points per game, tying him as the QB7 in that statistic in that span with Sam Howell and Jordan Love. Over the past five seasons (2018-2022), Mahomes averaged 23.5 fantasy points per game compared to the lowly 19.3 fantasy points he’s averaging per game this year - an 18% decrease in production this season compared to the past five years on average for Mahomes.
That’s coincided with a significant dip in production for what has historically been the top fantasy football tight end in the NFL since 2018, Travis Kelce. Since 2018 over the last five years, Kelce has averaged 18 fantasy points per game compared to 16.7 per game this year; not as sharp a decrease in overall production, but still notable. The most notable detail, however, about Travis Kelce’s 2023 season is the fact that he has rejoined the rest of the TE pack at the top of the fantasy scoreboards – and that he hasn’t operated as the positional advantage he was drafted to be this season.
From 2018-2022, the average PPR point margin between Travis Kelce and the next-highest scoring tight end in fantasy football through 13 weeks was 36.2 points. This year, Travis Kelce is the leader in fantasy points per game at the position by 1.1 points per game, but he has not separated himself from the rest of the pack as he has done in years past. In other words, the positional advantage that many of Kelce’s managers drafted him to provide simply hasn’t been there this season - a microcosm of a Kansas City offense that has scored just 22.9 team points per game in 2023.