play0:29Derwin James Jr. ends Chiefs’ playoff hopes with an INTGardner Minshew is picked off by Derwin James Jr. to seal the Chargers’ win over the Chiefs.
play0:51Schefter doesn’t expect big changes to Chiefs’ coaching staffAdam Schefter doesn’t expect the Chiefs will make any voluntary changes to their coaching staff this offseason.
play0:24Micah Parsons forces a fumble as Packers take overMicah Parsons forces a fumble on RJ Harvey, and Edgerrin Cooper recovers for the Packers.
Derwin James Jr. ends Chiefs’ playoff hopes with an INTGardner Minshew is picked off by Derwin James Jr. to seal the Chargers’ win over the Chiefs.
Schefter doesn’t expect big changes to Chiefs’ coaching staffAdam Schefter doesn’t expect the Chiefs will make any voluntary changes to their coaching staff this offseason.
Adam Schefter doesn’t expect the Chiefs will make any voluntary changes to their coaching staff this offseason.
Micah Parsons forces a fumble as Packers take overMicah Parsons forces a fumble on RJ Harvey, and Edgerrin Cooper recovers for the Packers.
Even in a sport where the risk of serious injury on any given play is part of the business, Sunday delivered a pair of franchise-altering, league-shifting knee injuries.
I’ll start there, with an organization that was already facing a very significant offseason before the stakes were raised even higher.
Chargers fans won’t have much sympathy given what they’ve gone through at offensive tackle, but for the second year in a row, the Chiefs were stuck in December with tackles they couldn’t possibly have wanted to play meaningful football this season. Last year, they rotated through Kingsley Suamataia, Wanya Morris and D.J. Humphries at left tackle before pushing Joe Thuney outside, which led to a disastrous appearance in the Super Bowl.
Well, that plan didn’t work. Nobody could have anticipated that Morris and Moore would go down on the opening series of games in consecutive weeks. Simmons dislocated his wrist against the Cowboys. Taylor hadn’t missed a single game due to injury as a pro before going down with triceps and knee issues several weeks ago. Veach planned for what he thought could be the worst, and the 2025 season just laughed.
Kelce’s contract expires after the season, though, and if he does return for one more go-around, it won’t be at that price tag. Noah Gray has struggled with drops recently, but on a three-year, $18 million deal, the Chiefs would probably keep their 2021 fifth-round pick around for another season as the second tight end. Jared Wiley, selected in the fourth round of the 2024 draft, has two catches in nine games over two pro campaigns.
Could the Chiefs lean into that and go with quantity over quality? Going after two or even three tight ends this offseason might be a way for them to replace Kelce in the lineup, if not necessarily his role in the offense. Veach could pursue tight end help earlier than he typically would in the draft, although the league’s thirst for tight ends during the aforementioned personnel shift might cause players at a perennially underrated position to get pushed up the board.
Derwin James Jr. ends Chiefs’ playoff hopes with an INT
Gardner Minshew is picked off by Derwin James Jr. to seal the Chargers’ win over the Chiefs.
The Chiefs will have to decide whether they want to give cornerback Trent McDuffie a new contract, and they’ll likely move on from Kristian Fulton after a disappointing stint. But the one big contract that might come up for discussion is at right tackle. Taylor is owed $20 million in the final year of his deal, none of which is guaranteed. That’s top-tier right tackle money, and given his penalty issues, Taylor is more like a solid starter than someone challenging for Pro Bowl honors.
Cutting Taylor would free up $20 million and open up a spot in the starting lineup for Moore, who would take over at right tackle in the second year of his two-year contract. It would create a hole at swing tackle, but Veach would address that with some of the savings by moving on from Taylor. Suamataia could also move to right tackle, but that would just open up a different hole in the starting lineup at left guard.
Pacheco played a valuable role on the 2022 and 2023 teams, but after fracturing his fibula in 2024, he hasn’t been the same caliber of player. Reid briefly turned to Carson Steele before in 2024 bringing back Kareem Hunt, who had been cut by the organization in 2018 after kicking and shoving a woman. Hunt has been excellent in short-yardage situations over the past two seasons, but he has shown virtually no explosiveness and has just one run over 20 yards across 348 attempts in Kansas City.
The Chiefs can go after Hall if he hits free agency this offseason, and backs like Rico Dowdle, Travis Etienne Jr. and Javonte Williams currently project to be on the market after impressive 2025 campaigns. No matter what the Chiefs do, this isn’t a place where Veach can run things back with the same names and faces in 2026. Pacheco and Hunt will both be free agents, and a fresh start atop the depth chart would make sense for the Chiefs.
Schefter doesn’t expect big changes to Chiefs’ coaching staff
With the likes of Tucker Kraft, Elgton Jenkins and Devonte Wyatt already on injured reserve, the Packers are staring down the threat of another postseason without multiple starters on both sides of the football. GM Brian Gutekunst’s draft-and-develop philosophy generally leads the Packers to one of the deepest rosters in the league, but as we saw in last season’s playoff loss to the Eagles, even that depth has its limits.
Gutekunst’s stunning move to trade two first-round picks and Kenny Clark to acquire Parsons before the season both went against type and served as an announcement that the Packers weren’t just accumulating talent. Factoring in a record-setting contract as part of the trade, Gutekunst was making an enormous bet that Parsons was going to be among the very best players in football over the next few seasons.
As teams trading for players like Khalil Mack and Jamal Adams have shown in years past, it’s difficult for that bet to pay off. Trading unknown future picks for known superstars is great on paper, and there have been times (mostly involving the Rams) where it has worked, but the bar for success is extremely high. With the implied value of the draft picks sent to the Cowboys included, the Packers are paying Parsons the equivalent of $65 million per season over the next four years.
Micah Parsons forces a fumble on RJ Harvey, and Edgerrin Cooper recovers for the Packers.
While the splits with and without Parsons weren’t quite as significant as they were during his time with the Cowboys, we also saw a pretty significant split in Green Bay’s pass defense with their star edge rusher on and off the field. With him in the lineup, the Packers allowed the league’s 10th-lowest QBR to opposing quarterbacks. Across 109 dropbacks without him this season, the Packers fell to 22nd by that same metric.
Parsons and the increased pressure rate were also covering for an issue the Packers have dealt with throughout the season: a lack of turnovers. Led by Xavier McKinney’s eight interceptions, the Pack forced 31 turnovers in 2024, the fourth most of any team. On a drive-by-drive basis, only the Bills and Vikings forced more turnovers than the Packers, who turned 16.4% of opposing possessions into takeaways.
This wasn’t a one-year, all-in trade by any means, but the Packers were a Super Bowl-caliber team with Parsons in the mix. Now, suddenly, things are much tougher for the Packers in the NFC.
For GM Brett Veach, this was the nightmare scenario that his 2025 offseason had attempted to avoid. Left tackle has been a revolving door for the Chiefs since Eric Fisher’s departure, as they cycled through Orlando Brown Jr., Donovan Smith and then the 2024 cast before turning things over to Simmons, their first-round pick in the 2025 draft. Moore was the most expensive swing tackle in the NFL, a two-year, $30 million insurance policy in case Simmons or Taylor was unable to go. In a pinch, the Chiefs still had Morris, whom the organization trotted out for most of 2024 at left tackle, but they wouldn’t actually need to call upon their fourth option at tackle, right?
For that production, the Chiefs have paid Kelce just over $17 million per year between 2024 and 2025, a figure that would be out of line if the guy receiving it wasn’t a franchise icon and a surefire Hall of Famer. Any other player would have been released or asked to take a significant pay cut heading into 2025. But given that Kelce was already considering retiring before returning for this season, I’m not sure there was ever a realistic scenario where the Chiefs could have asked or expected their legendary tight end to come back for a fraction of what he was owed.
So whom do the Chiefs replace Kelce with as their primary tight end? And what does that mean for their offense? It’s tempting to try to find a like-for-like replacement, but Kelce’s one of the most unique players in recent league history. The Chiefs aren’t going to be able to acquire someone like Brock Bowers or Trey McBride. Kyle Pitts Sr. is a pending free agent, but he’s not the same sort of improviser as Kelce, and his blocking isn’t up to even Kelce’s standards. If he keeps having three-touchdown games down the stretch, the Falcons might even choose to franchise him.
The other option would be to evolve the offense away from a Kelce-like presence at tight end and spread the field more consistently, which would either be behind the curve or ahead of it, depending on whether you think those shifts to bigger personnel groupings have peaked. It’s telling that the Chiefs left Simmons on an island more often than any other left tackle in the NFL this season while he was in the lineup, per NFL Next Gen Stats. If the Chiefs have two tackles they trust in pass protection and don’t need to chip or keep a sixth player in to block, that would allow Reid to consistently get five eligibles out into routes. That hasn’t always been the case over the past few years when the line hasn’t been right.