Chiefs Can Only Blame Themselves for Week 1 Wideout Woes
JuJu Smith-Schuster. Mecole Hardman. Jakobi Meyers. Adam Thielen. Darius Slayton. DeAndre Hopkins. Odell Beckham Jr.
All of the above names represent players of varying skill levels at different stages in their respective careers. They also represented a major chunk of the available talent in the wide receiver free agent pool from this spring and summer. Despite being directly connected or loosely linked to multiple wideouts in that group, the Kansas City Chiefs ultimately decided that the unit they already had was good enough to get the job done after signing Richie James and drafting Rashee Rice.
One game into the 2023 NFL season, that sentiment of satisfaction and the vote of confidence has led to perhaps the worst receiver performance of the Andy Reid-Patrick Mahomes partnership in Kansas City. Unfortunately, the team has only itself to blame for such an underwhelming night out of the gate against the visiting Detroit Lions.
Sure, being without tight end Travis Kelce didn't help matters one bit. But all offseason long, the Chiefs' wide receiver room was praised for its impressive depth and propped up as a group destined to take a step forward. Kelce being out left the door wide open for someone else to step up and cement themselves as a force to be reckoned with but instead, the night left the reigning champions with more questions than answers.
To be fair, both Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Justin Watson deserve passes for their play. After all, they did combine for four receptions and 93 receiving yards. The same pass could also be applied to second-year man Justyn Ross, who logged just six snaps all game and caught the only ball thrown his way. Rookie Rashee Rice and veteran Richie James, while far from perfect, weren't significant reasons why the team lost. At the core of this room, the blame should be directed towards the two receivers Kansas City was supposed to be able to count on to deliver the most production this season.
Returning from a meniscus injury from early in training camp, Kadarius Toney's 2023 debut was quite easily the worst game of his career. Not only did he convert on just one reception out of five targets, but he had multiple costly drops that killed Chiefs offensive drives. One of them, a pass that was seemingly in his hands but then bounced out, led to a Brian Branch pick-six that caused a staggering 23% swing in win probability according to Next Gen Stats. Another was a play that would've put the team in field goal range late in the game. Toney's drops weren't relatively harmless — they were soul-crushing.
The leader of the wideout room in snaps, Skyy Moore, is coming off a rookie campaign in which he rarely jumped off the screen. He did very little to contribute to the offense in a major way in year one until Super Bowl LVII, yet the team, its fans and media alike collectively anticipated a much stronger effort from the sophomore in 2023. Forty-five reps, three targets and zero receptions later, they're still waiting for that breakthrough moment.
At halftime of Week 1, Mahomes had already completed 12 passes to eight different players and had 147 passing yards. He also had a pair of touchdowns: one to Rice and one to tight end Blake Bell. In the second half, however, the defending NFL MVP added just 79 yards on 22 pass attempts and had no more touchdowns plus the interception stemming from Toney's drop. This wasn't just some slight failure to connect between a quarterback and his receivers. It was quite literally one of the worst displays this century.
Of course, this is just one game. Positive regression suggests that Moore will eventually find a way to produce at some level, Toney's drops won't persist at such an embarrassingly high level and someone else in the receiver room will step up to a degree. With that said, this was a chance for Moore, Toney, James (who played 23 snaps) or even the rookie Rice to send a message of, "Hey, I need to be accounted for at all times!" Instead, the group fell flat on its face despite only seeing man coverage 8.5% of the time.
When Kelce returns, things will look different. He's a top pass-catching talent not just right now, but ever, and being without a player like that makes things extremely difficult. On the other hand, he's set to turn 34 in October. This could turn into a case study of relying on an aging weapon too much. If the receiver group continues to languish, No. 87 will once again push for career-best per-game stats. For his sake, as well as that of the Chiefs, the team's hope is that positive change is coming.
Bringing up that theme again, change, Kansas City opted against it at wideout during the offseason. General manager Brett Veach looked at the room, added a special teams/depth piece and an unproven rookie to it, went all-in, then essentially let the chips fall as they wished. Of the 17-plus chips in the Chiefs' stack this year — one to represent each game — the first one contributed to a losing hand. Progress is far from linear, though, so this is all to say that it isn't time to hit the panic button yet. But if receiver struggles come back to haunt the team at any point this season, many will come back to this game and think of it as a warning in retrospect.
