Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes discusses the challenge of facing the Denver Broncos’ strong defensive front ahead of Sunday’s NFL Week 11 matchup. By Emily Curiel
The Chiefs were back on the practice field Wednesday after a 10-day layoff, the label of a third-place team after a bye week for the first time since you-know-who arrived in Kansas City, and on the verge of their most important divisional game in, what, the entire Patrick Mahomes tenure?
A lot of intrigue this week.
But for one day — or for at least about five minutes during a media viewing window — that intrigue shifted to a singular place on the field.
No. 71.
Josh Simmons is back with the Chiefs, the rookie left tackle’s hiatus persisting far longer than the bye week provided his teammates. It’s been a literal month since Simmons abruptly left town for what the organization vaguely termed a family matter, invoking a confrontation between what we’re entitled to know versus perhaps what we want to know.
That Venn diagram has some overlap, but you’re at least entitled to your curiosity, and the Josh Simmons situation has induced plenty of it.
His practice attendance Wednesday erased some of that curiosity, offering a reply to the most pertinent question: When might he return to the team?
But it leaves more than a few other questions and more than enough curiosity in its aftermath:
What now?
Will he play?
Is he mentally and physically ready?
Chiefs coach Andy Reid wouldn’t divulge his plans for Simmons, not even for Sunday, when the team travels to face first-place Denver. In the course of three replies during a news conference, Reid used the word “see” 11 times — as in “we’ll see,” “let’s see” and “I gotta see” how Simmons looks during practice and responds to a couple of days of it.
But that doesn’t prevent us from studying a question in the interim: Should he play?
Simmons left Kansas City suddenly a day before the Chiefs were set to host the Lions on prime-time TV. He left behind a starting job protecting the blind side of Mahomes, forcing Jaylon Moore into the lineup despite only rarely practicing with the first team over the previous five weeks.
I bring that up not just for a reminder but for specific context. On Monday, I’d asked Reid to evaluate how Moore has filled in for four games, and he responded, in part, that “just asking (Moore) to jump in after the season has (already) been going for a couple of months, that’s a tough ask.”
It is.
Kind of like, you know, the possibility that confronts Simmons now.
It has been 37 days since Simmons played in an NFL game, and he’s only played in five of them in his life. That’s the foundation. Reid said he knows Simmons has been working out but acknowledged Wednesday that while he’s sure he’s fine physically, “let’s just see what kind of shape he’s in.”
That’s one factor, and it’s a pretty big one. But there are others. For starters, it’s a heck of a time to be conducting this exercise.
The Broncos lead the NFL in quarterback pressure rate at 42.9%, per Next Gen Stats. So on nearly half of an opposing team’s snaps, at least one Broncos rusher is in the quarterback’s grill by the time the football is released.
They have 46 sacks as a team, 14 more than anyone else in the league, on pace for 78 1/2 for the season and therefore on pace to break the 1984 Chicago Bears’ all-time record (72). Denver edge rusher Nik Bonitto leads the NFL with 51 pressures.
That’s the assignment awaiting a Chiefs left tackle Sunday.
Do they want it be awaiting a rookie who hasn’t been in the facility for more than a month?
We’d be talking about this matchup — the leading pressure generator in the NFL against a rookie left tackle — if Simmons hadn’t missed a snap all year. By the time the Chiefs step onto the field Sunday, he will have missed 41 days of snaps.
I know that seems like a discussion driven by a short-term benefit. It isn’t, not exclusively.
The Chiefs spent weeks in St. Joseph preparing Simmons for the job in training camp. Asking him to take over after a 41-day break isn’t putting him back into the same set of circumstances in which he was starting to thrive. It’s harder, and you have to consider the long-term repercussions. What if he immediately gets plugged back into the lineup, and it goes south?
That’s not about his ability to do the job — or at least not solely about his ability. It’s about preparedness. It’s about being thrown into the fire of the aforementioned matchup. And it’s about the alternative.
The Chiefs do have a Plan B. It’s the best thing they did during the offseason — secured not one but two viable options at a position in which they had none a year ago.
Moore has filled in admirably, and while he probably had his worst game against the Bills, his quarterback didn’t help the cause and neither did the receivers’ inability to separate. But if that’s his floor as a player, well, we probably would’ve called it the Chiefs’ ceiling at left tackle last year.
In the end, this is a one-game decision, not a season-long blueprint. Nothing would preclude a switch the following week.
Which is a significant part of the point. They can and will always reevaluate a week from now. The difficulty of the assignment Sunday in Denver will offer plenty to evaluate, whomever is the subject of it.
It’s a more difficult ask for some than others.