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The official NFL statistic to quantify the efficiency of the pass is the classification of the passer, which considers the percentage of completion, yards per pass, touchdowns and interceptions. The passer rating is far from a perfect statistic, but at first glance it provides a good overview of how efficient a quarterback is.
And Patrick Mahomes is the all-time leader of the NFL, both in the regular season and in the postseason.
To qualify for the regular season record, a quarterback must have launched 1,500 career passes. Mahomes surpassed that mark in the 2020 season and has now launched 1,687 passes in his career. He has a career passer rating of 108.7, surpassing Deshaun Watson’s 104.5, Aaron Rodgers’ 103.9, Russell Wilson’s 101.7 and Drew Brees’s 98.7.
It is noteworthy that everyone in the Top 5 was active during the 2020 NFL season. Quarterbacks are much more efficient now than they used to be, and this is one of the failures of the passer classification: it does not fit at the time, so it will always favor modern passers.
But that is what makes Mahomes break the post-season record so remarkable. Mahomes has a passer rank in the postseason of 106.6, and when Mahomes reached a minimum of 150 postseason passes to qualify, he broke a record that Bart Starr has held since the 1960s.
It’s proof of how great Starr was in big games that he had a post-season passer rating of 104.8, still second only to Mahomes in NFL history. The NFL’s offensive passes were so different during the Starr era that most of the pass numbers from that era look ridiculously bad. (In 1969, Starr led the league with a passer rating of 89.9, while in 2020 the league’s average passer rating was 93.6.) In the playoffs, Starr showed numbers in the 1960s that look great even in 2020.
Mahomes is now releasing figures that the NFL has never seen before.