2026 Kansas City Chiefs Fantasy Preview: Will Patrick Mahomes be 100 percent?

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Patrick Mahomes strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn't miss Week 1 even if he should.

Whether he'll be 100 percent healed from his late-season knee injury remains to be seen, and may not be known until the final few days of the offseason. Report after report after report says Mahomes is well ahead of schedule and confident he'll suit up for Week 1 against the Broncos. There is a difference, as the football knower knows, between a quarterback who is able to play and a quarterback who is fully back from a major medical setback.

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Where Mahomes falls on that spectrum will impact every fantasy-relevant Kansas City player in 2026.

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▶ 2025 Kansas City Chiefs Stats (Rank)

  • Points per game: 21.3 (22nd)
  • Total yards per game: 321 (21st)
  • Plays per game: 62.4 (16th)
  • Dropbacks per game: 43.6 (2nd)
  • Dropback EPA per play: 0.09 (14th)
  • Designed rush attempts per game: 22.1 (29th)
  • Rush EPA per play: -0.06 (14th)

Passing Game

QB: Patrick Mahomes
WR: Xavier Worthy, Nikko Remigio
WR: Rashee Rice, Allen Cyrus
WR: Tyquan Thornton, Jalen Royals
TE: Travis Kelce, Noah Gray

Assuming Mahomes is upright and functional as the centerpiece of the KC offense, the question shifts to this: Will Mahomes, after years of never-ending check-down passes, finally let it rip the way he did during his Tyreek-fueled heyday?

The answer, I'd guess, is no. Mahomes in 2025 finally showed some willingness to push the ball downfield a bit. That came with a caveat though.

Mahomes Air Yards Per Attempt

  • 2022: 31st in air yards per attempt
  • 2023: 30th
  • 2024: 32nd
  • 2025: 14th

That 2025 air yards number isn't half bad until you dig a little deeper and find that Mahomes last year still refused to chuck it deep against two high coverage, as we talked about on the Rotoworld Football Show. Mahomes last season ranked 37th out of 45 qualifying QBs in downfield passing rate versus two-high safety looks, in the range of fellow check-down artists like Kirk Cousins and Aaron Rodgers.

Coming off a devastating knee injury, I don't see much reason to believe Mahomes will rediscover his swashbuckling deep-throwing ways in 2026.

The excuses for Xavier Worthy appear to have no limit. EVery time I point out with facts and figures that Worthy has been one of the league's worst, least efficient receivers, I'm told he was injured or he was not schemed properly or Mahomes is a poor downfield passer or Worthy had an upset tummy that day. I guess there's always an excuse when you want a player to be good, and Chiefs fans very much want that for Worthy as he enters his fourth NFL season.

Anyway, Worthy last year converted a minuscule 33 percent of his air yards into actual, edible receiving yards — one of the lowest rates in the NFL, and way lower than that of Tyquan Thornton, who is most definitely better than Worthy as a downfield threat.

Worthy’s miserable 2025 catchable target rate (63 percent) was well below his 2024 rate of 75 percent, though a rising average depth of target and air yards per target could help explain why Worthy’s 2025 looks weren’t as good as they were in 2024. To connect these dots one would have to admit that Patrick Mahomes had a pretty crappy 2025 campaign (Please don’t be mad at me: Daniel Jones had a higher dropback success rate and EPA per dropback than Mahomes).

Worthy’s profile was quite different in 2025. After 70 percent of his targets came within nine yards of the line of scrimmage in 2024, Worthy saw 49 percent of his looks come in that range last year. Perhaps this is what head coach Andy Reid meant when he said the team was “afraid” to use Worthy in certain ways following his Week 1 shoulder injury. More easy-button targets for Worthy could make him something close to a weekly flex play in 12-team formats in 2026.

After considering retirement for a ninth consecutive offseason, Travis Kelce is back and more plodding than ever. He shapes up as a boring if solid fantasy pick this season based on his almost-guaranteed target volume in the pass-happy Chiefs offense. Kelce in 2025 commanded a decent 21 percent targets per route and ranked eighth among tight ends in yard per route, tied with Tyler Warren. That Kelce had a first-read target of just 18 percent — well short of the 23-25 percent rates he once enjoyed — shows he has fallen to a secondary option in the KC passing attack, especially when Rashee Rice is available, healthy, and not being pursued by the authorities.

While we're on first-read targets: Only ten wideouts saw a higher rate of first-read looks than Rice in 2025. He saw a target on a whopping 31 percent of his pass routes last season over eight games, higher than Ja'Marr Chase and CeeDee Lamb, among others. And importantly for fatasy purposes, Rice remained Mahomes' main inside-the-20 option. His 17 red zone targets over eight games ranked fifth among all wideouts, with most of the guys ahead of Rice playing a full season in 2025.

You're going to have to keep it locked to Rotoworld.com this summer for the latest on Rice's legal situation, and whether he'll face yet another suspension. Reid told reporters in late May that the league had not indicated Rice would not be suspended in 2026. Last seen juking his way out of jail, Rice will be a high risk/high reward fantasy play. A full season — if he can swing it — would give Rice top-5 fantasy upside.

Running Game

RB: Kenneth Walker III, Emari Demercado, Emmett Johnson
OL (L-R): Josh Simmons, Kingsley Suamataia, Creed Humphrey, Trey Smith, Jaylon Moore

The KC offensive line, per (almost) every metric, was not all that good in 2025. They struggled with some injuries, though it was nothing outside the NFL norm. The central problem, it seems, was that the Chiefs o-line had two of the league’s least explosive players running behind them throughout the season.

Kareem Hunt and Isiah Pacheco in 2025 combined for the lowest rate of missed tackles of any backfield in the NFL and the fifth lowest rate of yards after contact per carry. They were abysmal. Mahomes, who runs like a dad, was by far the team’s most efficient, productive rusher.

https://www.nbcsports.com/fantasy/football/news/fantasy-football-2026-who-benefits-from-run-heavy-red-zone-offenses

Enter Walker, a desperately-needed upgrade for the Chiefs backfield. Walker’s explosiveness should add a big play element to a stale KC offense in 2026. Eight percent of Walker’s rushing yards in 2025 came on runs of at least 15 yards; that was the fourth highest rate in the NFL behind De’Von Achane, Keaton Mitchell, and his new backfield mate, Demercado. Defenses respecting Mahomes and outright refusing to stop deploying two high safety coverage against Kansas City should keep the boxes quite light for Walker in 2026.

Defenses in 2025 played eight or more defenders in the box against the Chiefs at the NFL’s fourth lowest rate. That’s become the norm since KC opponents collectively decided in 2022 that Mahomes would no longer beat them deep.

It’s clear, after signing a three-year deal worth up to $45 million, that Walker will enter the regular season as the Chiefs’ locked-in No. 1 back. While that doesn’t mean he’s going to see every high-leverage touch the way Christian McCaffrey and Bijan Robinson do in their respective offenses, Walker should see plenty of chances to be productive, assuming Mahomes (knee) is ready to go for Week 1. Chiefs coaches have suggested throughout the offseason that the team could adopt a slightly more run-heavy approach to begin the season if Mahomes is not quite right after his late-season knee injury. That should set up nicely for Walker.

One potential issue for Walker: The Chiefs are likely to remain among the NFL’s pass-heaviest teams inside the 20 and inside the 10, limiting easy touchdown opportunities for Walker — if he is, in fact, the team's primary red zone rusher.

Demercado, meanwhile, has worked as KC’s No. 2 back throughout offseason practices, according to beat writers. Like Walker, Demercado is a high-variance rusher who has proven explosive while posting a sometimes-shocking rate of negative runs. I would guess Demercado would function as Kansas City’s nominal lead back should Walker miss time in 2026, though I would not be surprised at all if Emmet Johnson — a fifth-round 2026 pick out of Nebraska — figures prominently into the rushing attack.

The Chiefs traded up to nab Johnson in the draft, with front office officials reportedly “shocked” Johnson was still on the board in the fifth round. Johnson, 22, who had a 100th percentile college dominator rating at Nebraska along with a 99th percentile college target share. Someone in the Chiefs front office is a spreadsheet knower.

Arrowhead Pride’s Ron Kop, Jr. said the rookie runner is “projected to be the immediate backup to Walker in the lead-back role, but don’t be surprised if Johnson earns his way onto the field on pass downs or in other situations.” Johnson, who had a ho-hum 1,823 total yards in 2025, will be a savvy end-of-the-bench fantasy stash this summer, especially for those who valiantly use some variation of the Zero/Hero RB draft strategy.

2026 Kansas City Chiefs Win Total

DraftKings Over/Under: 10.5
Pick: Under (-140)

I stand with ESPN’ Ben Solak, who recently spelled out why, exactly, the Chiefs are bound to miss the playoffs for a second straight season as their dynasty atrophes and falls behind the league’s trendsetters. Andy Reid, in short, has struggled mightily to keep pace with head coaches who are 20 and 30 years his junior. And it goes without saying that Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay are running schematic and play-calling laps around Old Andy.

The Chiefs in 2025 were actually on the right side of variance (luck) in several key categories. They led the NFL with an 82 percent fumble recovery rate (one of only three teams with a rate of over 70 percent). A little less of that luck, Mahomes perhaps being a touch slow in recovering from his major knee injury, and some key defensive losses is going to make 11 wins tough to come by for the once-great Chiefs.

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