Patrick Mahomes makes ESPN’s list of 20 most dominant athletes in the world
With three games left to be played, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has already thrown the eighth-most touchdown passes in an NFL season.
Mahomes is now a leading candidate to win the NFL MVP award and he’s helped the Chiefs to the best record in the AFC at 11-2.
Not shabby for a first year as a starter.
If you’ve wondered how Mahomes’ success would translate on a bigger scale than even the NFL, ESPN The Magazine has one answer. It put Mahomes at No. 18 on its list of the top 20 most dominant athletes in the world for 2018.
Here’s the methodology ESPN used to determine each athlete’s dominance rating: “The process started by grading athletes by the strongest performance measures available in their sport over their most recently completed season ... including timed scores, earnings and, wherever possible, advanced metrics. Then, to put those achievements into historical perspective, top athletes in a sport were compared to the best in their field each year since 1998, and results were adjusted to put those athletes onto one common baseline, yielding our ratings.”
U.S. gymnast Simone Biles was No. 1 with a 3.248 dominance rating which, according to ESPN, “meant was 3.25 standard deviations better than the typical top-four performer in all-around women’s gymnastics since 1998.”
Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge was second and MMA star Daniel Cormier was third on the list.
Dan Hajducky wrote of Mahomes, who had a dominance rating of 0.829: “There has simply never been a quarterback as prolific, this early in his career, as Mahomes. He is the only player in NFL history with more than 3,000 passing yards and 30 TDs in his first 12 games. Among the active crop of Canton-bound QBs — Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger, even Eli Manning — none broke even 2,000 yards or amassed 20 TDs. (Each has at least 40,000 yards and 330 passing TDs now.)
Here is the full list:
1. Biles
2. Kipchoge
3. Cormier
4. Ariya Jutanugarn (professional golfer)
5. Katie Ledecky (Olympic swimmer)
6. Chloe Kim (Olympic snowboarder)
7. Breanna Stewart (WNBA)
8. Luka Modric (soccer player)
9. Simona Halep (tennis player)
10. Novak Djokovic (tennis player)
11. YuzuruHanyu (Olympic figure skater)
12. Lewis Hamilton (race car driver)
13. LeBron James (NBA)
14. Mookie Betts (MLB)
15. Drew Brees (NFL)
16. Justify (the horse)
17. Alex Ovechkin (NHL)
18. Mahomes
19. James Harden (NBA)
20. Mike Trout (MLB)
You can read more here.