They say football is a game of inches and, in the Chiefs’ divisional playoff win over the Jaguars, there’s real proof of that going back more than 16 months before the ball was snapped at Arrowhead.
It was late August 2021. The Chiefs, with a reworked offensive line room, had a surplus at tackle. Tackles are always valuable on the end-of-camp trade market, and the Patriots had a need at the position and were in talks to acquire Yasir Durant, who Kansas City had developed as an undrafted free agent over the year prior. The Giants came in late, offering a conditional seventh-round pick. The Chiefs went back to the Patriots, saying a hard seventh would get it done.
New England forked over the pick and, based on the conditions set, there’s no guarantee the Chiefs would’ve gotten that pick from the Giants had Durant gone there.
That seventh-rounder became Washington State corner Jaylen Watson, who started against Jacksonville on Saturday. He played 49 of Kansas City’s 61 defensive snaps (80%), and 10 more on special teams. And with 3:48 left in the divisional playoff, he skied over Jags receiver Zay Jones to pull down a one-handed, game-sealing interception with his team up 27–17 and Trevor Lawrence & Co. driving.
These are the sorts of guys the Chiefs have needed to find, and then rely on, because Kansas City’s reality in 2022 is very different than the one it was working with when its run of five consecutive home AFC title games started in '18. And it’s probably not even a stretch to say it wouldn’t be here without guys like that, or the transactions that brought them to town.
Every year, in this space, we do a roster analysis on the conference finalists and, as a result, we have data on how the Chiefs have evolved through the past half-decade.
Much of the top layer remains the same. Travis Kelce. Chris Jones. Most of all, of course, Patrick Mahomes. But much of what’s around them has changed completely. Just eight guys are left from the 2018 team that lost to Tom Brady and the Patriots in overtime—Kelce, Jones, Mahomes, long snapper James Winchester, kicker Harrison Butker, tackle Andrew Wylie, defensive tackle Derrick Nnadi and backup quarterback Chad Henne. And the shift in the rest of the roster hasn’t just happened through the faces in the building changing.
How the team is put together is, well, different than it was at the start of all this. The 2018 Chiefs had 25 homegrown players on their 53-man championship-game roster, 21 of them drafted, and four of them undrafted. The next year, when the team won its first Super Bowl in a half-century, just 21 homegrown players dotted the 53-man roster.
As it stands now, 32 of the 53 rostered Chiefs are homegrown, including 27 draft picks, which is no accident.
