Article summary: Data helps your company compete to win. Organizations that understand how data wins championships—the “Mahomes Factor”—become extraordinarily difficult to beat.
Topic: Thrive Through Data
Associated keyphrase: Data Visibility
In case you’re wondering, yes—Mitchell Trubisky has bigger hands.
Leonard Fournette is significantly faster.
Solomon Thomas can jump higher.
And Myles Garrett scored 25% better on the Wonderlic Test.
Bigger. Faster. Higher. Smarter—at least by conventional measures. That’s what nine NFL teams prioritized in April 2017 when they drafted these players (and five others) ahead of Patrick Mahomes.
In fact, the quarterback from Texas Tech might have slid even further if Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid hadn’t traded three draft picks to move up and select Mahomes at number 10.
Less than three years later, Reid’s so-called “gamble” looked anything but risky. By February 2020, Patrick Mahomes was the most electric player in football, delivering Kansas City its first Super Bowl championship in decades—and earning Super Bowl MVP honors along the way.
But for Andy Reid, it wasn’t really a gamble at all.
While other teams were blinded by data distraction (hand size! vertical leap!), Reid focused on the root-cause metrics that actually predict performance—and it gave the Chiefs a decisive edge.
What Is Data Distraction?
Visibility is the true power of data. When the right key performance indicators (KPIs) are made visible, leaders can see what actually drives outcomes. Used well, data accelerates decision-making and propels organizations to the front of their industries. In short: purposeful data wins championships.
Data distraction, by contrast, is what happens when data is mishandled—the assumption that all available data is relevant. When leaders treat noise as signal, decision-making slows, errors multiply, and momentum stalls. Data chaos is expensive.
Jon Thompson, author of The Dashboard Effect, describes this phenomenon as “drowning in a sea of spreadsheets.” He recalls reviewing a client’s reports only to realize that after an hour of analysis, neither side had any clearer sense of how the business was actually performing.
This problem is common—and it scales quickly. As companies grow, new systems are layered on top of old ones. To avoid disruption, legacy reports remain in place, even as they drift further away from the metrics that truly matter. Executives tasked with navigating this growing sea of spreadsheets often find themselves lost.
So how did Andy Reid avoid this trap on draft day? He understood how data wins championships—and he let that understanding guide every decision.
How Data Wins Championships
Patrick Mahomes may have had smaller hands, but he completed 65.7% of his passes in his final college season. He may not have been the fastest runner, but he threw 41 touchdowns in a single year.
Reid and his team ignored the distractions. Instead of obsessing over measurements that looked impressive in isolation, they focused on performance indicators that translated directly to winning football games.
That’s how data wins championships: by helping leaders see what actually matters.
It’s also why Blue Margin invested years refining a system of root-cause analysis that surfaces the metrics most critical to success across industries like private equity, distribution, healthcare, and more.
“One of the most effective problem-solving models,” Thompson explains, “is identifying root issues—reducing a problem to a few foundational causes rather than a long list of symptoms.” This level of clarity creates a Mahomes Factor in business: sustained advantage built on data visibility.
Putting the Mahomes Factor to Work in Your Business
Every player contributed to the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win—but Mahomes was the catalyst. Data visibility grounded in root-cause analysis can play the same role in your organization. Jon Thompson outlines a simple five-step framework to get started:
- Define the goal (in measurable terms)
- List the problems that hinder the goal
- Identify proximate issues and root causes (ask why, repeatedly)
- Assess potential designs (how efficiently do they advance the KPIs?)
- Execute—and evolve
There’s more to the full framework (detailed in The Dashboard Effect), but the real question is this:
When your organization’s “draft day” arrives, will you be among the many misled by data distraction?
Or among the few who clearly see—and act on—the Mahomes Factor?
Three Key Takeaways
1. “Visibility is the great power of data; it reveals KPIs that would otherwise remain unseen.”
2. “Data distraction is the power of mishandled data—assuming that all data is relevant data.”
3. “The most effective problem-solving focuses on root causes, not a long list of symptoms.”
