Is It More Smoke or Fire With the Chiefs' Wide Receiver Room

The Chiefs' WR room continues to struggle to find their footing in a tight victory over the Jets on Sunday night.

The Kansas City Chiefs are coming off a hard earned victory over the New York Jets but the game left far more questions than answers for the fans of the team. The Chiefs instantly jumped out to a 17-0 lead after scoring on their first three possessions before the wheels seemingly fell off. There was a little bad luck, a few bad plays by the Chiefs, and a few great plays by the Jets and the Chiefs found themselves in a 60 minute rock fight.

Ultimately Isaiah Pacheco and Patrick Mahomes’ legs were able to carry them to a 23-20 victory on the road to move into first place in the AFC. The “issue” on the outside is how uneven and inconsistent the offense continues to be. Mahomes’ made some inexplicably bad throws leading to turnovers in this game and more significantly, there was another long stretch of football in which the offense looked borderline incompetent.

We all know that’s not the case with the offense as a whole but they have now fallen into these ruts in three of four games this season. There is a long list of things leading to this outcome for the Chiefs’ offense but the one that has remained the most static throughout the first month of the NFL season has been the lack of production, consistency, and reliability from the Chiefs’s WR room.So let’s take a jump into the deep end of the Chiefs’ offensive struggles and see if we can tell what’s going on with the WR room.

Chiefs Wide Receivers’ Struggles

Rashee Rice and Kadarius Toney provided some flashes in a more limited usage - hopefully this can continue to develop into more - so focus is on the rest of that room.. Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Skyy Moore, and Justin Watson were the Chiefs top three snap getters in the Chiefs WR room combining for 122 total snaps. Those 122 snaps resulted in 4 targets for 11 yards, that is not a good output for the unit as a whole.

The Jets have an exceptional secondary and were always going to be a difficult challenge for the Chiefs’ passing attack but they needed to provide some pushback. The Jets’ defense was given freedom to play man, zone, blitz, or bracket Kelce on any given snap due to the lack of impact from these three WRs putting their mark on the game.

Locked Down in Man Coverage

This was the biggest concern for the Chiefs’ WR group coming into this season, and while teams have opted for more zone coverage against the Chiefs this year when they do slip in Man coverage reps it doesn’t look pretty. Both Valdes-Scantling and Watson share a similar skillset of being bigger bodied, vertical WRs that take a little time to build up to speed. They can stretch the field but need time to get into their routes and are somewhat reliant on defenders taking bait on double moves or being caught out of position by the play design.