I think the bolded is a really great point, and one I should probably look at a bit more in the big picture of profiling fantasy players one season to the next.
You know, it sort of came to me because I had a high ankle sprain during a crucial year for me with respect to getting recruited for hockey and it took so damn long to heal that I essentially had played the recruiting year on a garbage ankle (which they say doesn't matter for hockey but when you can't push off hard enough to skate well and your one chance is blown then you remember that stuff) and wound up way, way behind the recruiting eight ball to the point I was relegated to no-prayer Division One walk-on and forget that.
So I know that these things we expect to heal magically just don't. Patrick is clearly getting needles or he wouldn't have been able to walk the past couple of deep runs, including their win against the Eagles and then (I think his ankle was jacked) against the 49ers in both of those Super Bowls they won. Then going to three in a row, which by the way, is such an incredible thing—and made more incredible by the fact that their QB is a sitting duck getting shot up to run and then doing just that. It's stunning.
So maybe Mahomes is not the greatest fantasy quarterback—and keeping this on fantasy, I don't think he's really going to break out too much this year, either.
Everybody has been running that Fangio D against him for three years now, and every year we've seen a step down. So he's almost thirty and fighting Fangio and all those forces. I hope he comes back in some great shape, but I'm not going to knock him if he does because KC is just on a different timeline than fantasy players are. We're cooking steaks with gas; they're using charcoal.
My suggestion overall for fantasy is to get teams that are hungry to prove stuff right away. You never know who that is precisely, but you can narrow it down. Think Dak and receivers in Dallas. Think Coen in Jacksonville with Lawrence and that offense. Coen's got something to prove.
Back to Mahomes. He's a low-end QB1 or a high-end QB2 right now. That's about it. But calling him out of shape (I think) ignores the ankle and the deep runs and doesn't take into account
when KC wants to be in tip-top shape. That's around November.