Spring Training is coming and we’ll have lots of baseball stat takes, but we’re taking a week to point out the coolest stat of Super Bowl LVII.
On Sunday, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and Eagles center Jason Kelce will be the first brothers whose teams will face each other in a Super Bowl.
Though they won’t actually take the field against each other (unless something crazy happens), they will be competing over which will make a bigger impact in the game.
The Kelce brothers have made big impacts throughout their careers but especially during the 2022 season.
Travis Kelce is considered one of the best the best tight ends in NFL history. He’s made eight consecutive Pro Bowls and is a four-time First Team All-Pro. He led all tight ends with 53 Total Points, our player value stat that measures everything a player does on the field.
What made Travis Kelce so good? He’s as reliable a target as Patrick Mahomes’ has. Kelce caught 26 of 29 catchable throws from Mahomes in third-down situations and turned those into 24 first downs. His 92% first down percentage ranked second among tight ends. In the playoffs, he’s caught 21-of-26 targets in all situations, for 176 yards and three touchdowns.
Jason Kelce is 35 years old, two years older than Travis. He’s a six-time Pro Bowl selection and a five-time First Team All-Pro. That’s not bad for a sixth-round draft pick (Travis was a third rounder).
Kelce led all offensive linemen with 56 Total Points, which was particularly impressive given that his previous high for Total Points since we began tracking it in 2016 was 31.
What made Jason Kelce so good? Our Video Scouts, who chart every play of every NFL game, assign blown blocks any time a blocker does not successfully block the defender they attempted to engage with and, as a result, gives the defender an opportunity to negatively affect the play. Jason Kelce had the third-lowest blown block rate in the NFL on both run plays and pass plays in 2022 (among those who played a minimum of 300 total snaps).
He did so while ranking in the top 20 in blocking snaps for the year. No one who had a lower blown block rate was in the top 100 in blocking snaps.
The Kelce brothers are emblematic of their respective teams in that they’re the best in the game and it will be fascinating to watch the way that they affect their team’s chance of winning on Sunday night.