Over the next few weeks/ months, we’ll go division by division in these “divisional check in” highlighting some data nuggets and angles we find most valuable. While not every team will get a full breakdown, we’ll touch on every team as we work through the board. As always, the goal is to match the data presented with your own ideas and intuitions in forming theses on these teams. I have been running a bit long in the previews from earlier so going to try and keep these more focused and compact.
Let’s take a quick glance at Offensive and Defensive EDP, or Earned Drive Points which measures the efficacy and sustainability of drive level success, to set the baseline for our analysis. Of course EDP is just one metric and is by no means dispositive to team success. Nonetheless it should give us a rough frame from which we can analyze the division and teams.
The Chiefs in a bit of a lost year had a decent defense and offense that was performing at the top of the league before Mahomes went down. The Broncos rode a terrific defense and improved offense to a solid regular season even if the #1 seed was perhaps a bit of an overperformance. The Chargers defense was terrific again under Jesse Minter and the offense was merely average following the collapse of the offensive line. The Raiders were a train-wreck on offense all season and with a defense hovering around average. But in a division with plenty of coaching changes and some key QBs coming off injuries there are perhaps more questions than answers here.
KC:
Q: Can Mahomes find his earlier career form after his ACL injury?
The 2025 Chiefs year was the first of the Mahomes era not ending in at least the Conference Championship with the Chiefs missing the playoffs and Mahomes going down with a season ending injury.
Now if we look at some of the high level data, Mahomes still had a terrific year by PFF Grade and the production of EPA/Play albeit a bit down from some of the peak years earlier in his career. And Mahomes numbers in accuracy, his grading in and out of structure have remained dominant. But what has changed for Mahomes was his sack rate and sack avoidance.
Mahomes was 95th percentile in his sack rate for the first 6 years of his career while being one of the best pocket extenders in the NFL. But over the last 2 years Mahomes has been more limited in his extension post pressure and his sack rate has gone from the S tier to simply above average. Coming off an ACL, it seems unlikely for Mahomes to improve in this area, though perhaps the Chiefs will operate a quicker offense given the trade-off of Mahomes not being able to extend as well.
While they may not be the #1 offense of Mahomes early years, this still a Chiefs offense I am bullish on.
Having a healthy (and not suspended) Rashee Rice back gives Mahomes the much needed #1 post Hill and with Kelce’s decline as Rice has been one of the games premier YPRR and YAC specialists in his small sample of time. Thornton was a sneaky great deep threat last year, where Mahomes threw deep more often and with more success opening up some of the other areas for Worthy who has been far better attacking the short and middle areas of the field rather than as a deep threat.
The defense that was above average last year, lost much of its secondary with McDuffie and Watson going to LA and breakout Safety off to Cincinnati.
Watson and McDuffie, both last year and in previous seasons, have been amongst the games best preventing separation. And for a Spagnolo defense that is man and blitz centric, the CB play is essential to the success of their defense and the team will be reliant upon L’jarius Sneed, who has been hurt and is the owner of PFF grades of 34 and 50.4 (102/112) to step up at outside CB. Chris Jones is a year older but was still the 2nd best Pass Rusher on the interior by PFF and George Karlaftis took a step up at EDGE
Combined with the heavy blitzes, the talent leaves plenty of opportunity to create disruption pressure again, an area where they were in the top part of the league.
The defensive ceiling is somewhat limited, but with Mahomes at QB, Reid at OPC and a likely upgraded WR room account for a healthy Rice, and this is still a team that can find itself right back in the AFC Championship game.
