How did Josh Simmons look in his first (almost) real action as a Chief?
Examining every snap Simmons took as the hype train goes full speed ahead.
FOOTBALL!
Well, at least sort of football.
The Chiefs (semi) officially opened up their 2025 season against the Arizona Cardinals Saturday night, playing their first preseason game and finally giving us some new snaps to discuss and evaluate. After an offseason that has somehow felt like it took an eternity but also passed in the blink of an eye, I cannot exaggerate how excited I am to look at new film rather than the stuff from last year. I’m so excited that I’ve left my camping trip and am currently typing this in the lobby of a hotel that let me use their lobby and wifi for 5 bucks. True story.
Of course, as I’ve discussed frequently here, preseason football is not real football. Rather, it’s a live-game-action scrimmage against an opposing team that isn’t doing everything it can do to win. However, that doesn’t mean preseason football doesn’t have value when trying to evaluate individual players. It allows us to look at how young and developing players look against non-teammates in a non-practice situation (particularly in 1x1 matchups in the trenches). It allows us to look at the TRAITS of individual players in a more valuable way.
With that in mind, I wrote earlier this week about multiple players I had my eye on for this game, and what I’d be watching for with them. First on the list, naturally, is rookie left tackle Josh Simmons. We all know why Simmons’ development is the most important storyline of training camp. But what was I looking for? Well, here’s what I wrote previously:
… This is about traits and seeing whether the way he won in college translates to the pros. Does he look as smooth and fast with his movement (two different things) in game action as he does in practice? Does that upper body power show up? How does he handle a speed rush vs a bull rush? Is he able to generate movement up front when they run the ball?
Well, we’ve now got some snaps to review, so let’s get to it in terms of looking at how Simmons did in the next step of his development and in showing the traits that have made him successful so far. Something to keep in mind is that preseason can be fool’s gold (look no further than Suamataia’s relatively strong performance in last year’s second preseason game). But that said, this is by far the best look we’ve gotten at Simmons to date, and I’m intrigued at how he looked overall in terms of traits (though I still charted every snap for wins and losses as a pass and run blocker, of course).
The hype train has been out of control for Simmons, and it’s appeared legitimate. And tonight, in his 11 snaps, he only added fuel (coal?) to that hype train.
These are the types of snaps that get people hyped up for Simmons. We’ll come back to the specifics in a second, but the short story is that he showed no reason to slow down the train now.