The Kansas City Chiefs have not had a quiet offseason. They missed the playoffs for the first time since 2014. Their superstar quarterback is a coin flip for Week 1. Their top receiver is facing legal trouble. And now an ESPN analyst is telling Chiefs fans they should get ready for another long winter.
Seth Walder dropped a playoff prediction that is going to sit badly in Kansas City. He says the Chiefs will miss the postseason for a second straight year. That is not the kind of talk that wins you friends in a fanbase that still believes Patrick Mahomes can fix anything.
There is some logic to the pessimism. Mahomes is coming off a torn ACL he suffered last December. His scrambling ability is not a given. The Chiefs have not said much about his recovery timeline, but the team has not confirmed he will be ready for the opener. That alone makes the whole season feel fragile.
The front office spent big to fix a running game that had no juice. Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt could not get anything going on the ground. So the Chiefs threw money at Kenneth Walker III, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, to be the answer. That contract locks up a ton of cap space. It also limits what they can do elsewhere.
Secondary looks thin after departures
Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson are both gone. That leaves a secondary that was already shaky. The Chiefs have historically been good at finding cheap defensive backs and developing them. But Walder hammered the team for giving up three picks — No. 9, 74, and 148 — to move up for LSU cornerback Mansoor Delane. He called it bad value. The argument is that a team that builds defensive backs on a budget should not be burning draft capital on a top-10 corner.
Walder might have a point. But the AFC West is not what it used to be. The Denver Broncos have a deeper roster. The Los Angeles Chargers are getting buzz under offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel. The Chiefs are not the obvious favorite in that division anymore. Not even close.
Kansas City fans still have hope. But this roster has real holes. The schedule will not do them any favors. And if Mahomes is not himself early in the season, the playoff drought could stretch to two years. That is a sentence nobody would have believed three years ago.
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