Patrick Mahomes threw 51 checkdowns over his first three seasons as an NFL starter. Over the next three, from 2021 through 2023, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback attempted 122, per Pro Football Focus. So if it feels like watching Mahomes now isn’t as exciting as it once was, it’s not just nostalgia. The two-time NFL MVP has become a bit of a checkdown merchant in recent years. He ranks last in the NFL in average depth of target (5.8 yards) through eight weeks of the 2024 season, and no active quarterback has a lower aDOT over the last three seasons combined, per TruMedia.
Mahomes didn’t just decide to start relying on checkdowns after dazzling us with his deep ball those first few seasons. His declining aDOT is the product of the defensive adjustments his opponents have made over the past few seasons and his maturation as a player.
“It’s something that I’ve learned from Coach [Andy] Reid,” Mahomes said after a win over the Texans in the 2020 season opener. “All of us want to go for the big shot. All of us want to go for the touchdown pass every single time. But if defenses are going to play us back and going to play us in coverage [downfield], I’m going to take the stuff underneath and let the guys make plays.”
Mahomes threw four checkdowns in that game against Houston but only 14 over the remainder of the season. Perhaps the dopamine hit he got from completing a 54-yard touchdown pass to Tyreek Hill the following week made him forget all about that point of emphasis. Whatever the case, it took a full season—and a punishing (but educational) loss to Tampa Bay in the Super Bowl—for it to finally stick. And stick it certainly has.
Those lowered passing figures haven’t stopped his team from winning: Kansas City has won two Super Bowls in a row, and its quest for a three-peat is off to an undefeated start despite Mahomes throwing shorter than ever. But that doesn’t mean the Chiefs offense is thriving. Kansas City fell out of the top 10 in offensive expected points added last season and won a title on the back of an elite defense. In 2024, the offense ranks 10th in overall EPA and 11th in passing EPA. Kansas City’s explosive play rate (8.8 percent) is 29th this season, which seems to have Mahomes rethinking his dedication to those underneath passes and searching for a more efficient middle ground.
“When I was younger, I would just cut it loose,” Mahomes told The Kansas City Star earlier this month. “I would just go through the reads the way [it] said on paper, and I would throw the deep shot if it was there—like, give it chances.
“And there are times now where I’m like, well, they’re in this coverage, and that’s not supposed to be there. But it is. … Sometimes you give the defense too much credit.”
Mahomes is alluding to the fact that there’s a thin and blurred line between a good checkdown and a bad checkdown. There are quarterbacks who throw checkdowns too often and those who don’t throw them often enough. Some quarterbacks go to that option too quickly, and others wait too long. If a quarterback as talented as Mahomes has trouble deciding when to throw a checkdown, you can imagine the problems his less-accomplished peers are facing. Because it’s not just Mahomes who’s taking what the defense gives him these days: The leaguewide checkdown rate has increased in each of the past four seasons, jumping from 5.3 percent in 2020 to 7.3 percent in 2023, per Pro Football Focus. Through the first eight weeks of the 2024 season, quarterbacks are checking it down on 8.2 percent of their dropbacks.
That change is due to a number of factors: evolving defensive coverages, which are designed to eliminate explosive plays; higher pass rates on first downs (when checkdowns are thrown most often); and an increased willingness from quarterbacks to throw underneath. And with these plays becoming more and more common, the art of throwing a checkdown has never been more important.
Before anything else, let’s establish what a “checkdown” is; while the term has become something of a catchall for any short pass, not all short throws are checkdowns. Checkdowns are built into plays as a last-resort option and are usually paired with a deeper passing concept. According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the term “checkdown” was in 1981. That’s around the same time that it started appearing in NFL playbooks. Here’s a diagram of a running back route tree from Joe Gibbs’s 1986 playbook with Washington:
Back then, “check-down” referred to a specific pass pattern where a back ran a short hook over the middle. A route to the flat was called a “check-flat,” and one that went just outside the tackle box was called a “check-release.” At some point over the years, we decided to simplify things and just refer to any of these throws as a checkdown. And in that time, the concept also became synonymous with conservative quarterbacking. The preferred weapon of the dreaded game manager. No quarterback wants to be called a “Checkdown Charlie.”
There’s a good reason for that: Checkdowns aren’t just boring to watch; they’re also a generally inefficient way to move the football. From 2018 to 2023, checkdowns averaged negative-0.08 EPA per play with a success rate of 42 percent. Excluding checkdowns, NFL dropbacks over that span averaged 0.01 EPA per play with a 45.3 percent success rate, per Pro Football Focus and TruMedia.
When executed properly, though, a checkdown isn’t replacing a more efficient throw downfield; it’s replacing a throw into coverage or a sack, and that exchange can help preserve drives. “I’ve had a couple quarterbacks that just keep looking deep—they won’t throw the checkdown,” Bruce Arians, then the Buccaneers coach, said in 2020. According to Arians, Tampa Bay offensive consultant Tom Moore “has the best saying in the world: ‘You don’t go broke putting money in the bank. Take the damn checkdown.’”
Taking the damn checkdown isn’t always the smart decision, though—even when the downfield coverage holds up. When a checkdown is thrown is just as important as why it is thrown. Moore’s words should apply only on first and second down. You can go broke taking a 5-yard profit on third-and-10, so quarterbacks should avoid throwing checkdowns on those money downs. Unsurprisingly, the numbers back this up: Checkdowns are most efficient by EPA and success rate when thrown on first down and least efficient when thrown on third down.
League-wide Checkdown Efficiency by Down, Since 2021
If you dig into the splits of quarterbacks who consistently perform well on checkdowns, most of their attempts come on early downs, while the ones who perform poorly often throw them on third down. Young quarterbacks seem to have the most difficulty with this differentiation. Kyler Murray, Joe Burrow, and Trevor Lawrence all rank near the bottom of the EPA leaderboard on checkdown throws since 2021, and in the case of all three, 50 percent of their checkdowns have come on obvious passing downs, per PFF and TruMedia. Burrow, who begrudgingly accepts the value of these plays, gave us an egregious example of a poorly timed checkdown on the final drive of Cincinnati’s Week 1 loss to New England.
That’s going out sad, but that play has nothing on this Ben Roethlisberger checkdown from the 2021 season. This one came on fourth down, with the Steelers trailing by multiple scores late in the fourth quarter, and the ball was thrown almost instantly.
Roethlisberger’s 2021 season was a master class in throwing bad checkdowns. At 39, he had no interest in taking hits, and the Steelers’ offensive line wasn’t any good, so Roethlisberger started opting out of plays as quickly as possible. His average time to throw on checkdowns was 2.66 seconds that season. That was not only the fastest time in the league but it was also quicker than the league average time to throw on all pass attempts. Remember, checkdowns are supposed to be a last resort. Roethlisberger was treating them as his primary option. And with a 33.3 percent success rate on those throws, this unique strategy did not work.
Fractions of a second can make the difference between a checkdown that’s thrown too quickly and one that’s thrown right on time. In 2018, Roethlisberger ranked second in EPA on checkdowns with an average time to throw (2.89 seconds) that was still well below the league average, proving that a quick checkdown isn’t always a bad one—as long as the quarterback is actually giving the downfield routes time to develop before waving the white flag on a play. Tom Brady and Philip Rivers also put up good numbers, throwing sub-three-second checkdowns later in their careers. Here’s an 11-minute video of Brady expertly throwing checkdowns during his title-winning season in Tampa Bay.
An above-average time to throw doesn’t hurt the efficiency of a checkdown, either. Typically, though, it’s the mobile quarterbacks who do this efficiently late into a play. Lamar Jackson has been the NFL’s king of checkdown efficiency since 2021, and nobody is even close to challenging him for the title. He also has the league’s highest average time to throw on those plays.
EPA Leaders on Checkdowns, Since 2021
Jackson’s ability to make throws from various arm angles while also evading pressure is the secret to his success on these underneath throws—which are often made from a collapsing pocket.
His situational awareness is also key. Jackson rarely throws a checkdown on third down. He’s more likely to take off and try to move the chains with his legs rather than dump it off to a back.
Understanding how defensive coverages work can also help a quarterback throw better checkdowns. They work best when defenses play with two safeties deep—which is why their rates have increased as the NFL’s use of two-high coverages has risen. That shift in defensive philosophy was partly in response to the Chiefs’ dominance early on in Mahomes’s career. In 2021, Kansas City was seeing more two-deep shell coverage than any team in the league. To counter it, Mahomes attempted 40 checkdown passes that season, coming close to matching his career total to that point. He averaged 5.6 yards per play with a 55 percent success rate on checkdowns in 2021, and that efficiency, along with the departure of Hill in the offseason, led to yet another defensive adjustment in 2022. As Mahomes noted in October of that year, “Defenses are definitely throwing us different pitches. They know last year was more shell coverage and zone coverages. They had success with that, we started beating that, and now we’re back to man coverage.”
That didn’t work, either. Mahomes was even better against the man looks in 2022, and he won his second ring and was named MVP after putting up career-best efficiency numbers. So defenses went back to playing their soft zones, and checkdowns were back on the menu. Mahomes won another Super Bowl taking those checkdowns in the 2023 season, but the Chiefs’ passing game wasn’t nearly as explosive as it had been in 2022. Letting Mahomes pick apart the secondary with short throws may not be a good option, but it’s probably the team’s best option. That doesn’t apply to most other quarterbacks.
Mac Jones and Kenny Pickett are prime examples of how easily typical dink-and-dunk offenses can be defeated. Both former first-round picks were willing to throw the checkdown and take a profit on early downs, but they couldn’t do much more than that. Defenses were content with giving up 4- and 5-yard gains knowing that one negative play or turnover would derail the possession. There was no need to get out of coverages that encourage checkdowns and switch over to more aggressive ones that open up downfield opportunities.
It’s been suggested that a strong run game is the best method for defeating the two-high shell coverages that are designed to eliminate downfield throws. The belief is that, eventually, defenses will get tired of giving up 6- and 7-yard chunks on first down and pack the box with more defenders. Then, boom: more explosive plays in the passing game. But if your team doesn’t have, say, Detroit’s offensive line, Kyle Shanahan’s play calling, or Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry in the backfield, it can be difficult to sustain that kind of ground attack.
As Mahomes has shown, there are other ways of staying ahead of the chains on early downs. And harnessing the power of the checkdown is a far less expensive way of doing it than building an elite run game. Plus, while certain inefficient quarterbacks may run the risk of earning a Checkdown Charlie moniker, the true artists are adept at hiding their checkdowns in plain sight.
