Felix Anudike-Uzomah: First step fixed, but questions remain
FAU may have finally solved his biggest issue, but whether he can be an impact guy is another story.
One of the best things about preseason football is the opportunity to see how young, developing players have… well, developed (I’m a wordsmith, I know) since the prior season.
As I’ve said before, one of the magical things about this time of year is our undying optimism. This extends to players with a year or two in the league, whom we always assume will take a step forward and work through weaknesses shown the previous year (while we simultaneously expect older veterans to come back without any dropoff). It’s a wonderful fantasy, though reality is often unkind to our optimism-fueled expectations.
Anyways, let’s talk about Felix Anudike-Uzomah (we’re going to go with “FAU” for the rest of this piece). The 2023 first-round pick basically got a redshirt year last season. I’ve written about him multiple times here… breaking down his college film following the draft, discussing his first preseason action LAST year, taking a look at how he performed in Week 1 of ‘23 (when he actually saw significant snaps with Chris Jones and Charles Omenihu out), and finally writing about him and a few other younger players in the Chiefs’ “sit the starters” Week 18 game.
In other words, very few players have been looked at as frequently as FAU was last year. And now, we’ve finally gotten our first glimpse of him in 2024. I’ve said here before that this is a massive season for FAU given how last year went. Generally speaking, players who aren’t really contributors in year one, if they don’t make a decent jump in year two (to at least someone who can help out as part of the rotation), aren’t going to pan out in the long run. That’s not a blanket guarantee, but it is usually how it goes in a league that moves fast.
The biggest issue FAU had last season was being consistently late at the snap. This is very different from having a “slow” first step. His first step is fine (though not great). It just consistently came a full two-tenths of a second (an eternity in the NFL) after everyone else on the line. It was the oddest thing, watching a player who is by all accounts a decent athlete get off the line slower than defensive tackles. But it was a real problem last year, and created a situation where he was playing catch-up much of the time.
But we’ll circle back to that. On Saturday, FAU saw 30+ snaps and (unlike Kingsley Suamataia) definitively did NOT get “starter treatment” despite seeing some snaps with the first team. Instead, he was given the “we still don’t know who this guy is” treatment, playing the majority of the game. On the plus side, that gives us the opportunity to have a larger sample size to see where FAU has improved and/or stayed the same from last season. And so I reviewed every snap, charting pass rush and run defense downs for wins, losses, and neutral plays, as well as for pressures/hits/sacks, stuffs, and effective double teams.
Let’s talk about FAU’s first action of his all-important second season, starting with his very first snap. We’ve got good news, and bad news.
