Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes have been clear about Kelce’s role in the Kansas City offense since Mahomes took over in 2018: Kelce has no real designed routes in the team’s passing attack; he simply gets open and Mahomes finds him.
That formula, however unorthodox, has produced a gaudy 697 receptions for 8,251 receiving yards for Kelce since the start of the 2018 season. In the history of the NFL, only Tony Gonzalez and Jason Witten have more tight end receiving yards and catches than the guy who enjoys an almost psychic connection to the greatest QB to ever play the game. Only four tight ends in the history of the league have more touchdowns (77) than Kelce.
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What were Travis Kelce’s 2024 stats?
- 97 receptions
- 823 receiving yards (lowest in his career)
- Three touchdowns (lowest in his career)
- 8.5 yds per catch (lowest in his career)
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The whole arrangement where Kelce sort of slinks around the middle of the field looking for an open patch of grass worked markedly less well in 2024. While there are numerous ways to demonstrate just how sharply Kelce fell off during his 12th NFL season, here are a few:
- Kelce’s yards per route run — a solid measure of a pass catcher’s efficiency — was the lowest of his NFL career.
- Kelce’s yards after the catch per reception (3.9) was by far the lowest of his career.
- Kelce finished dead last in ESPN’s open score, which measures a player’s ability to separate from defenders.
Kelce’s YAC per reception is particularly startling, and perhaps revealing of a fading 35-year-old tight end who said this week that he’s mulling retirement after Kansas City was dismantled by a vastly superior Eagles team in Super Bowl 59. Among the most effective after-the-catch producers over the past decade, Kelce’s YAC/reception was well short of his pre-2024 career average of 5.9 and miles south of his career-best mark of 7.7. To call Kelce’s 2024 after-the-catch production a dip would be quite the understatement.
“I’m gonna take some time to figure it out,” Kelce said Tuesday on his New Heights podcast. “And I think I owe it to my teammates that if I do come back that it’s gonna be a wholehearted decision and I’m not half-assing it, and I’m fully here for them. … I think I can play, it’s just whether or not I’m motivated or it’s the best decision for me as a man, as a human, as a person to take on all that responsibility.”
You may pull up your various spreadsheets and discover a Gotcha Moment on the charge that Kelce has reached the cliff-falling portion of his tremendous career. Kelce, you’ll see, trailed only Brock Bowers and Trey McBride in tight end receptions in 2024. Only Bowers, McBride, and George Kittle had more receiving yards than the lumbering, ineffective Kelce.
That’s because, to the Chiefs’ great detriment, Kelce remains the focal point of the Kansas City passing offense:
- Kelce led the Chiefs with 131 regular season targets, a 24 percent target share.
- Xavier Worthy was second with a mere 93 looks from Mahomes.
- Kelce accounted for a team-leading 23.4 percent of KC’s receptions, which, as pointed out above, were quite inefficient.
That Kelce was second on the team in regular season air yards — just 21 air yards behind Worthy — captures just how unexplosive the Chiefs offense was in 2024. It’s not optimal, per the analytics nerds, to have a deeply inefficient 35-year-old tight end as the centerpiece of your passing attack.
Things would have been different if Rashee Rice had not suffered a brutal season-ending injury against the Chargers in Week 4. Through the season’s first three games, Rice dominated with a 35 percent target share to Kelce’s 14 percent. Rice saw 32 percent of the Chiefs’ air yards over that three game stretch, while Kelce was a distant third behind Rice and Worthy. Tormenting opposing defenses over the middle of the field, Rice almost assuredly would have made the Kansas City offense far more efficient in 2024.
A healthy Rice playing 17 games would not have changed the conservative, check-down nature of the KC offense, however. Mahomes averaged five air yards per attempt over Rice’s three healthy games, the second lowest mark from Week 1-3 and very much in line with Mahomes’ season-long mark of 6.2 air yards per throw.
If Kelce returns to the Chiefs in 2025 — seemingly a big if considering his podcast comments — he would likely function as Mahomes’ No. 2 option behind Rice, should he return to the lineup at full health. Kelce as a distant secondary option would probably be a boon for Mahomes and the entire Chiefs offense considering Rice, before his knee injury, ranked third — behind Tyreek Hill and Jayden Reed — in YAC per reception. Rice is undoubtedly a great fit for a Mahomes offense.
The Chiefs could never compensate for the loss of Rice, and turning to Kelce as the primary over-the-middle target meant Andy Reid’s offense was going to have to get away with it over and over again if they were going to threepeat. Against the Eagles in the Super Bowl, when Kelce caught four of six targets for a humble 39 yards and seemed generally disinterested in the proceedings, the Chiefs finally met an opponent against whom they could no longer get away with it.
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What is Travis Kelce’s contract status?
According to our friends at Pro Football Talk, Kelce has a $4.5 million non-guaranteed base salary in 2025 along with a $250,000 workout bonus, and a $1 million non-guaranteed roster bonus which would be paid out on the fifth day of training camp. Most importantly, he has an $11.5 million roster bonus which is due to be paid on March 14.
In other words, we should learn about Kelce’s future very soon.
