Playoff Mahomes by Playfair Data

American football quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes, has won playoff games to the tune of 15 games through his first six seasons as a starter. That outpaces the current record holder, Tom Brady, who, in his first six seasons as a starter, won 12 playoff games. To track this unprecedented trajectory, the Playfair Data team created Playoff Mahomes, a longform infographic that seeks to inform fans and sports media about Mahomes’ statistics compared to his well-known predecessors, key storylines going into the 2023 championship game, and some little-known data insights about the Mahomes-led Chiefs, all in an easily-digestible, visual way.

The first highlight of this data visualization is the novel geometric highlight table that summarizes Mahomes’ entire career (as of publication) in a very concise space. That same chart selection is used to demonstrate the little-known fact that Mahomes was undefeated against the upcoming opponent in that year’s championship game and in the venue in which the game was being hosted. A three-dimensional marginal histogram is then used to show how Mahomes has already ascended the ranks of NFL quarterback history. Lastly, the running total line graph seeks to drive the point home that we are witnessing sports history.

Please note that all images used within this visualization are either created by the Playfair Data team or are officially licensed photo credits (Jamie Squire / Getty Images via Getty Images Sport; Michael Owens / Getty Images Sport via Getty Images). This visualization earned over 1,000,000 impressions across all social media platforms within its first 48 hours of being published and is still used to track this unprecedented performance today.