The Kansas City Chiefs suffered a quick blow at the wide receiver position in their preseason opener, with new starter Marquise Brown briefly hospitalized due to a shoulder injury suffered on his first catch. The veteran speedster won’t require surgery, head coach Andy Reid announced Monday, but could still be sidelined into the start of the 2024 NFL season.
Which begs the question: Are the Chiefs approaching a crisis out wide? Brown’s injury could linger well into the season, and he also missed a combined eight games due to separate ailments while playing for the Arizona Cardinals from 2022-2023. And then there’s Rashee Rice, last year’s rookie standout, who faces a potential multi-game suspension for his role in a high-speed car crash this spring.
If neither Brown nor Rice is available to open the year, the Chiefs would be down both of their presumptive top two receivers, vaulting first-round rookie Xavier Worthy into a likely No. 1 role. It’s certainly not an ideal situation, considering Worthy’s elite speed didn’t warrant him a single target in his preseason debut, nor does the Texas product have any experience testing his smaller frame (5-foot-11, 165 pounds) against real NFL defenses.
Even then, it’s hard to get in a tizzy about Kansas City’s offensive prospects.
Start with the depth out wide. Even when Brown signed in free agency and Worthy arrived in the draft, neither was expected to command a lion’s share of targets with Rice also onboard alongside reserves like Justin Watson, Skyy Moore, Kadarius Toney and Mecole Hardman. There are varying opinions about the reliability and/or upside of the latter options, but all four have played meaningful snaps for Kansas City in the past, with Watson quietly logging career highs in catches (27), yards (460) and touchdowns (3) in 2023. In other words, this receiver room was always going to be a weekly grab bag.
It’s not dissimilar to the groups that literally helped the Chiefs win back-to-back Super Bowls the last two seasons. Different names have “starred” during different stretches — JuJu Smith-Schuster here, Marquez Valdes-Scantling there — while the unit as a whole has remained largely interchangeable. It’s an approach not many teams can afford, but when your quarterback is Patrick Mahomes, your head coach is Andy Reid, your secondary weapons are the perpetually physical Isiah Pacheco and Travis Kelce and your defense is ruthless under Steve Spagnuolo’s watch, well, even general competence at this one position tends to keep the boat afloat. It’s a team sport, kids. And the Chiefs still have one of the best.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to look at here. Mahomes and Reid might be the first to tell you they’d prefer not to win a title like they did in 2023, leaning more on crunch-time conversions and suffocating defense more than, say, the high-octane explosions of the 2018-2019 trophy bids. Even spoiled Chiefs fans can still feel the scars of untimely drops and alignment miscues that dotted last year’s run.
And yet, even if we assume Brown and Rice will be inactive for the first handful of contests, there’s enough of an existing mashup of proven production (i.e. Kelce, Pacheco) and fresh legs (i.e. Worthy, Moore, even backup tight ends Noah Gray and Jared Wiley) to balance out Reid’s attack. Guys like Hardman and Toney can’t necessarily be counted on as steady gadget weapons, but they’ve shown enough juice to be possible bonuses. And all of that’s discounting the possibility of someone like Smith-Schuster also returning as insurance.
The greatest impact of the Chiefs’ current wide receiver hurdles, in fact, may well be stylistic; Brown was installed with the idea of reinstituting deep-ball success, which hasn’t really been seen with regularity in Kansas City since Tyreek Hill’s blockbuster departure. If he’s the biggest absentee other than Rice, and if Worthy isn’t ready to excel downfield at the pro level, Mahomes and Co. won’t necessarily be prohibited from passing the ball. They may well just take a page out of recent seasons’ handbooks and seek to maximize their short-area possibilities, prioritizing Pacheco and Kelce as chain-moving bludgeons.
Perfect? No. The Chiefs’ wide receiver situation is certainly not that. But since when have things needed to be perfect for the K.C. dynasty to press on?
