Arrowhead Pride Bye Week Awards: Team MVP

There are 11 games in the books — and six more to go. While we may not be right at the halfway mark of the 2021 regular season, the Kansas City Chiefs are taking their bye week in Week 11, so it’s a good time to dish out some awards.

The Arrowhead Pride writing staff members each had one vote for our seven midseason awards. There are 12 contributors, so there will be 12 votes tallied for each award. In this post, we’ll reveal our most valuable player to this point of the season.

VOTING: Hill (9), Patrick Mahomes (2), Travis Kelce (1)

Wide receiver Tyreek Hill is the only repeat winner of an Arrowhead Pride Bye Week award, as he also took home the Offensive Player of the Year title. I broke down the statistics of Hill’s season in that article.

Just like he did for Offensive Player of the Year, Hill won the team MVP award over quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce. There’s one word to explain why: consistency.

Mahomes has had stretches of spectacular play — but also poor performances. It was evident that Mahomes’ lack of comfort in the pocket and inaccuracies put the team in bad positions at times, especially in losses to the Buffalo Bills and Tennessee Titans.

Kelce has had some vintage performances this year, but the consistent connection that we’ve grown used to between Mahomes and the tight end has not been there this season. The quarterback isn’t relying on Kelce in terms of target volume as he has in the past — and even when Mahomes can find him, Kelce has dropped more passes than usual: he has dropped 9.3% of the passes thrown his way; that’s more than three percentage points higher than he’s had in any other season playing with Mahomes.

Hill has had bad drops, too — but not at the same rate; he has dropped 4.9% of his targets this year. The only game he was truly shut out from making a statistical impact was against the Baltimore Ravens. Still, that attention paid to him allowed his teammates at wide receiver to have big-time performances.

It’s clear that Mahomes and head coach Andy Reid are using Hill as the dependable, safety-blanket receiving option this season rather than Kelce. Every other year with Mahomes as the starter, Kelce led the team in targets per game, but Hill has a massive lead in that category this season.

For a player that may have been pegged as just a “deep-threat” receiver at times in his career, Hill has proven this season that he can adjust to playing any style of the position — no matter how defenses choose to defend him. That has given the offense a floor of competency, allowing them to be 7-4 despite periods of low-scoring outputs.