The Kansas City Chiefs are in the midst of the most successful run in franchise history. They have won the AFC West for nine straight seasons. They have made seven consecutive AFC Championship Games. They have played in five of the last six Super Bowls and have won three of them. It has been nearly a decade of dominance. Still, even during this stretch of success, the team has had to make tough decisions where they moved away from experienced veterans in favor of a new wave of young talent and it may be time for them to do that same thing once again.
There is no better example of a decision to take a chance on youth than when the Chiefs decided to trade away Alex Smith and go with their talented young first-round draft pick, Patrick Mahomes. The rest, as they say, is history. However, even during the Mahomes era, we’ve seen the team have to reset to keep moving forward. The most famous example of that was when they shocked the NFL world by trading away Tyreek Hill for draft picks.
When the Chiefs traded away Hill following a loss to the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Championship game, they insisted they weren’t “rebuilding” but “reloading”. The implied meaning there was that while they wanted to keep competing for championships, they needed to move on from aging (and expensive) talent to infuse the roster with younger (and cheaper) talent for the sake of sustaining success in the future.
The draft class that followed that trade included Trent McDuffie, George Karlaftis, Skyy Moore, Bryan Cook, Leo Chenal, Joshua Williams, Jaylen Watson, and Isiah Pacheco. That class was essential to the Chiefs winning back-to-back Super Bowls and making it to a third consecutive one. People remember the Hill trade and I think people are aware of how good that draft class has been, but that wasn’t the only major shift on the roster that offseason.
The Chiefs have let big names walk in free agency before.
The Chiefs also let two major defensive pieces walk in free agency. Tyrann Mathieu and Charvarius Ward were the two best players in Kansas City’s secondary during their first Super Bowl win and the seasons that followed. When the Chiefs allowed those players to walk and traded away Hill, there was a sense even among die-hard fans that it might take a season or two until they would be ready to compete for another Super Bowl.
That’s not to say that fans were down on the team. Everyone believed that with Patrick Mahomes the future was bright, but it would be revisionist history to say that fans believed KC would win back-to-back Super Bowls immediately after making those major roster moves. If you talk to fans of the New England Patriots during their long runs of dominance, they will tell you that a big part of their sustained success was moving on from talent before the drop-off came. We have now seen that be the case in KC as well.
The Chiefs now see an offseason where they have some big pieces that are about to hit free agency. Trey Smith, Nick Bolton, and Justin Reid have all been huge players in K.C. appearing in the past three Super Bowls and winning two. Now all three could be poised to get contracts at or near the top of their positions. The Chiefs guaranteed a big payday for Trey Smith when they decided not to franchise tag him. It might be scary to think of KC losing one, let alone all three of them, but just like in 2022 it might be what is best for the long-term success of the team.
There are obviously a lot more free agents than just those three. Charles Omenihu, DeAndre Hopkins, Marquise “Hollywood” Brown, D.J. Humphries, Tershawn Wharton, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Derrick Nnadi, Justin Watson, Kareem Hunt, Samaje Perine, and Matt Araiza are all pending free agents that either played key snaps (or in Humphries case, could have if he stayed healthy).
The Chiefs could piece together a competitive roster for next season by just re-signing their in-house free agents by moving money around and pushing the bigger cap hits down the road. Rarely do we see that work out in the NFL, but it’s hard to let talent walk out of the building when they have been a part of a team’s success—especially if there isn’t anyone clear to replace them yet. There will be valid concerns if that happens this offseason, but there were also valid concerns in 2022, and that worked out better than anyone could have ever dreamed.
So what do you think Chiefs fans? Are you ready to let many of Kansas City’s bigger-name free agents walk and turn the page again as we did in 2022? The Chiefs have four top 100 draft picks in the 2025 NFL Draft, including three in the top 66. Are you comfortable with them “reloading” with younger and less experienced players again or would you rather they try to keep as many proven vets as possible to increase their odds of winning a Super Bowl next season? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.
