Shocking NFL Stat Leader Predictions: Who Will Dominate the 2020s and Rewrite History?

Patrick Mahomes, Justin Jefferson and Derrick Henry have led the way in a few categories. Let’s take a look back at a column from five years ago and guess how the next five seasons may play out.

Patrick Mahomes, Derrick Henry and Justin Jefferson have been stars of the past five years, but who will be on top when we get to 2030? / Mark Konezny/Imagn Images (Mahomes); Nathan Ray Seebeck/Imagn Images (Henry); Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images (Jefferson)

I’d like to call your attention to a few sentences I wrote five years ago. It was shortly before Labor Day, on the eve of the 2020 NFL season, and I predicted which players would lead the league in nine statistical categories over the entire 2020s decade.

I was writing about passing touchdowns and picked Patrick Mahomes as the favorite. I wrote about the reigning MVP, Lamar Jackson. In the previous section on passing yards, I had already written about some of the promising young quarterbacks in the league: Dak Prescott, Deshaun Watson, Kyler Murray and Jared Goff. I even brought up two players who had yet to take a snap in the NFL, Trevor Lawrence and Joe Burrow.

Then I got to the passing touchdowns dark-horse candidates and wrote the following three sentences:

Want to project a Hall of Fame career for Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Josh Allen, Daniel Jones, Drew Lock or Gardner Minshew? Be as optimistic as you want. At least one of them will probably be high on all these lists 10 years from now.

Anything stand out? Rereading it now, I feel like an archeologist digging up a priceless artifact, perfectly preserved but clearly of another time.

Allen had just completed his second NFL season. I had watched his most recent game in person, a chaotic wild-card loss to the Texans in which he caught a touchdown pass on the opening drive, and then the Bills didn’t find the end zone again the rest of the day.

There was no reason for me to expect he would be a Hall of Famer. Buffalo had made the playoffs, but finished 24th in total offense and 23rd in points. Allen started all 16 games, but finished 23rd in passing yards. Kyle Allen had more yards in fewer games.

So what happened? Allen immediately started playing like a Hall of Famer. The Bills went 13–3 and reached the AFC title game. Allen threw for 4,544 yards and 37 touchdowns. He finished second behind Aaron Rodgers in MVP voting. In the five seasons since I wrote my piece, he has been in the top five in MVP voting four times, including taking home the trophy this past year. He’s 29 years old, in an era where elite quarterbacks play into their 40s. And while he couldn’t retire tomorrow and walk right into Canton (like Mahomes), his career seems headed that way as long as he stays healthy and keeps playing even close to the level he has over the first five years of this decade.

So how much credit do I get? I didn’t identify Allen, specifically, but I was dead on knowing that somebody out of that group would take a leap. I was at least smart enough to know that there was something I didn’t know. Smart enough to know how challenging the original exercise was and how much can change in the league over 10 years. I love making long-term predictions, and it was fun enough to reread this one that I’m ready to drop another fresh batch of sentences into the world so we can dig them up five years from now like a time capsule.

We’re halfway through the decade, so now let’s make some updates. I’ll take a look at how my predictions from five years ago are doing, and see what I’d like to change if I could. This time around will be significantly easier. We have five years of numbers banked and only have to peer five more years into the future. Of course, we’ve seen how much can happen even in five years, too.

*Note: For each player’s age, I am using their official season age per Pro Football Reference, which is determined by when their birthday falls.