What's Wrong With NFL QB Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs?

A season after leading his team to the Super Bowl and two years after winning it, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is struggling mightily — and it ain’t because he’s not getting his ketchup fix.

Playing behind an offensive line that featured three Week 1 starters who had never played a regular-season game, Mahomes was shaken up on a blindside hit to the head during his team’s Week 7 loss to the Titans before being replaced by Chad Henne in the fourth quarter. On pace to be sacked a career-high number of times through seven games (he’s currently on 14), Mahomes has routinely been forced out of the pocket, which has hurt his accuracy and led to turnovers.

Mahomes, who subsequently cleared the NFL’s concussion protocol and is not listed on Kansas City’s Week 8 injury report ahead of Monday night’s game against the Giants, currently ranks fourth in the NFL with 2,093 passing yards and has thrown 18 TDs versus nine picks this season while rushing 32 times for 219 yards and a score.

Those numbers aren’t terrible, but they haven’t been enough to prevent the Chiefs from stumbling to a 3-4 record to start the season after drawing one of the NFL’s toughest schedules. Mahomes’s stats haven’t been aided by his top playmaker Tyreek Hill being tied for second in the league in dropped passes this season, an issue that has also surfaced in other pass-catchers on Kansas City’s roster, per The Associated Press.

But after his career-low 6.0 QBR in last week’s game against Tennessee, Mahomes put the blame on himself.

“You can just watch the tape and know that I need to play better in order to have success,” he said Thursday. “There were plays where guys were open. There were plays where we had matchups down the field that I didn’t hit that I usually would give those guys opportunities to make plays. I’ve said something to them that I’ve got to be better. At the same time, they have that mindset that they’re going to try to build me up. It’s a thing where you’re not going to play your best game every single game, and that’s when you have to rely on your other guys to kind of step up and make plays for you.”

Thus far, Hill and secondary receivers like Josh Gordon and Demarcus Robinson haven’t exactly done that, and at least thus far, Mahomes hasn’t been able to pick up the slack.