Ask Gary: Chiefs’ draft needs, Marcus Peters’ trade rumors and Patrick Mahomes’ playoff chances

Welcome to “Ask Gary,” where you ask Gary questions and Gary answers them. Makes sense, right?

Anyway, I hit a bit of writer’s block, so I took to Twitter to ask if anyone had something they’d like me to research or comment on.

Below are some inquiries with my responses:

I took each game from 2017 and calculated the correlation between sacks and wins, as well as interceptions and wins. Sacks had a correlation coefficient of 0.31 which would suggest a slight correlation to winning football games.

Interceptions had a correlation coefficient of 0.36 which also suggests a slight correlation to winning.

What I find bizarre is the numbers are very close to one another. When I first ran the numbers I thought interceptions would be much more important than sacks, but that isn’t the case.

So to answer your question, interceptions are more important than sacks, but not by as much as I thought.

I’ve seen this question several times. To be honest, I don’t really like entertaining the thought of trading Marcus Peters because I think it makes about as much sense as eating Tide pods.

So what would it require for me to be happy with the Chiefs trading Peters, you ask? It would require a Mike Ditka-style “Trade your entire draft” move from another team.

Peters is playing like a future Hall of Famer. It makes zero football sense to trade Peters.

I think the Chiefs will look for defensive line positions in both the draft and free agency. Obviously, Sheldon Richardson is an intriguing player.

The Chiefs’ biggest hole, in my opinion, is at the nose tackle position.

I like the thought of the Chiefs keeping Logan for another year or signing free agent Dontari Poe or Justin Ellis from the Raiders. All of these players are essentially stop gaps though.

In regard to the draft, I love Tim Settle out of Virginia Tech. He is very young and his tape is explosive. Settle has a knack for creating tackles for loss and generally wreaking havoc in the backfield. He is currently projected as a second or third-round pick, but I think he may price himself out of the Chiefs range after the combine.

If the Chiefs can somehow land Tim Settle, I will be very, very happy.

Had to have been the Russians, right?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to compare all players’ total turnovers forced, but I can look up some other relative information.

In terms of numbers, Marcus Peters’ 19 interceptions in his first three seasons are good for the 19th best mark in NFL history.

If you exclude players who played in the era before illegal contact existed, only two players have more interceptions than Marcus Peters in their first three seasons: Ed Reed (21) and Richard Sherman (20).

Peters’ five fumble recoveries in his first three seasons are good for 191st place in NFL history, which is quite an accomplishment.

Comparing Peters against Ed Reed and Richard Sherman:

• Reed: four forced fumbles, two fumble recoveries, 21 INTs
• Sherman: four forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries, 20 INTs
• Peters: five forced fumbles, five fumble recoveries, 19 INTs

Basically, Peters is on the same level as Sherman and Reed in terms of taking the ball away.

Since the year 2000, 35 percent of second-year quarterbacks have made the playoffs.

Every year, 12 out of 32 teams make the playoffs, which equates to 37.5 percent.

In terms of the bigger picture, second-year quarterbacks are at a small disadvantage when compared to the rest of the NFL. However, the difference is small enough to be almost negligible. Long story short, Patrick Mahomes being a second-year player in the NFL should have little bearing when it comes to his team’s chance of making (or not making) the playoffs.

Since 1995, 27 teams have more playoff wins than the Chiefs. The Chiefs are tied with the Bills, with both teams having one playoff win during that time frame.

The Lions, Bengals and Browns each have zero playoff wins.

Since the start of 1995, there have been four expansion teams: Panthers, Jaguars, Ravens, and the Texans. Each of these teams has more playoff wins than the Chiefs, with 9, 15, 7, and 3 playoff wins respectively.

The Ravens are an interesting expansion team, as they technically became an expansion team in 1999 when the Browns re-entered the league and chose to keep their historical standing.

In terms of the regular season, the Chiefs have the 11th best win percentage in the NFL since the start of the 1995 season.

I really didn’t want to end on such a negative note, so I’m going to be lame and pose a personal question to myself:

Gary asks Gary

I spent a lot of time as a youngster nerding out to a number of computer games, but there is one game I still play to this day: Transport Tycoon Deluxe. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s essentially a game that’s all about building a transportation system and delivering passengers, mail, resources, and goods to different factories, power plants, etc.

Every time I play this game it will take at least two hours of my day.

Honorable Mention: SimCity 2000.

Well, that’s it for the pilot version of “Ask Gary.”

For my own benefit, is this something you’d like to see once in a while during the offseason?