Chiefs Love Fight in Their Rookies, Especially When They Fight

What matters most isn’t the size of the player in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the player. And when Josh Simmons and Ashton Gillotte fought toward the end of Wednesday’s practice, the Chiefs had to be excited about the amount of fight in their rookie class.

Fights between teammates at NFL training camps are commonplace, but rookies rarely rumble with each other. Kansas City’s respective first- and third-round selections in April’s draft, Simmons and Gillotte quickly made up after their scuffle. Afterward, they both saw it as a positive.

“No, it's definitely a good thing,” Gillotte said Saturday after practice. “It's great to have competition on the field. That's what we want. That's the only way we get better is if we're continuously pushing each other. Me and him have a lot of mutual respect. Coming from college, I watched his game, he watched my game. There's a lot of mutual respect. So, if we're on the field, I get the best of him, he gets the best of me.

“Things are gonna build; tension is gonna build. It was hot. Who cares? You know what I'm saying? At the end of the day, we're teammates, so we're just gonna keep pushing each other to get better.”

St. Joe is as hot as Boca Raton

In addition to fighting Simmons, Gillotte has been fighting what helped to cause those tensions to boil over, the Midwest heat and humidity in St. Joseph, Missouri.

The 6-3, 275-pound defensive end, who grew up in Boca Raton, Fla., had heard horror stories about Andy Reid’s notoriously exhausting training camps. He just underestimated the weather.

“I didn't think St. Joe was really gonna get this hot,” Gillotte said. “It's cooled off now, thankfully, but, yeah, I thought they were exaggerating a little bit. I came from Florida, so I was thinking, ‘I practice in 110 and it's been fine, but we don't have a breeze here. So, those days were hot, like very, very hot.”

Sep 28, 2024; South Bend, Indiana, USA; Notre Dame Fighting Irish running back Jeremiyah Love (4) runs the ball against Louisville Cardinals defensive end Ashton Gillotte (9) in the second quarter at Notre Dame Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Cashore-Imagn Images | Matt Cashore-Imagn Images

Gillotte, whose name is pronounced jill-AWT-ee, was hot last year at Louisville, where he led the country in quarterback hurries. He led the Atlantic Coast Conference with 11 sacks in 2023 and finished his college career with 24½ in only 51 games. And after 10 training camp practices, he’s also a reputable source for a scouting report on Simmons.

“I think he's very, very technical,” Gillotte said. “He plays with good pad level. He's a very strong guy, but he does a lot of things to try to remove his surface just so that you can't get a lot of power moves on him. He wants you to force him to open up, so, for someone like him, you have to take it to him.

"He's gonna switch your sets, he's gonna do everything, so just being able to react off him or take it to him and make him make a decision off of you. That's really the mind game with him and that's what we gotta do. So, it's a good thing to work against.”

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