Kadarius Toney Appears to Accuse Chiefs of Fake Injury Designations in Profane Rant
In a strange development on the morning of the Kansas City Chiefs' AFC Championship Game against the Baltimore Ravens, Chiefs wide receiver Kadarius Toney took to Instagram Live to seemingly accuse the team of exaggerating or falsifying his injury designations, according to multiple video recordings.
Shared on Twitter/X by multiple users including Gregg Giannotti of WFAN in New York and user @devindoob, clips of Toney's video were captured before disappearing from Toney's Instagram page.
"I'm not hurt," Toney says before a series of more profane explanations. "On God, not hurt, none of that. It go from hip to ankle to this to that. ... What else? I'm in a body cast right now, at this point." Toney then asks for someone to "go tell 'em what's really going on."
The video can be watched below, containing explicit language.
Editorial: Kadarius Toney just made everything worse
Barring a truly shocking development or justification for this rant, Toney just made several terrible moves in a row. First, if Toney is right about being healthy at some point since his last action against the New England Patriots on December 17, when he dropped a pass that was intercepted by the Patriots, then "what's really going on" is simple. He's been benched.
Toney had a disastrous season, starting with an injury before the first official snaps of training camp, leading to one of the worst wide receiver performances in modern NFL history in the Chiefs' Week 1 loss to the Detroit Lions. Add in a game-killing offsides penalty against the Buffalo Bills one week before the Patriots interception, and Toney has done more harm than good for this Chiefs team. But how have the Chiefs handled it publicly? Let's ask the most famous American football player in the world, Travis Kelce.
After Toney's penalty in Buffalo, Kelce went on his New Heights podcast in front of the NFL world and an army of Swifties not to discuss Toney's mistake, but to double down on his faith in him.
"I love KT," Kelce said. "If we get the opportunity again, I'm going to throw that s— right into his chest again. Hopefully it gets there. I've got all the faith in the world in that dude. He's one of our best players, man. He's one of the best players we've got with the ball in his hands. You turn on the film, you watch what he does when the ball's in his hands and you can't tell me you don't want that guy on your team. Everybody hating on KT right now, I'm not trying to hear that. You can f— miss me with it. I'm trusting in 1-9 every time he's out there on the field."
Patrick Mahomes backed Toney after the Lions game and after the Bills game. Andy Reid has routinely talked about Toney's skill and smarts at the podium. And now we're here?
Even as recently as Saturday night, less than 16 hours before he took to Instagram, either someone involved sure seemed to have been massaging the narrative.
After Toney was ruled out due to a personal/hip designation, James Palmer of NFL Network tweeted this:
Kadarius Toney had his first child tonight. A baby girl. That's where the personal part of his designation came from. He's also dealing with a hip injury that is keeping him out tomorrow.
Whoever wanted to get that information out there thought it would be good for the world to know that Toney's "personal reason' was the birth of his first child. Palmer also noted that his hip injury was, theoretically, real. The alternative? The Chiefs publicly acknowledge that Toney has been healthy enough to play, but that he's just not worth putting on the field.
That fact would be even more damning than his video. If Toney has to confront that he simply couldn't take advantage of the NFL's best quarterback/head coach combination and perhaps the league's thinnest wide receiver group, he should probably stop looking at his phone and start looking in the mirror.
