Ranking the most important 41 players on the Kansas City Chiefs, Part 2: 11 through 1

Finalizing the list of the most important Chiefs of the 2023 season.

I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating… The NFL offseason is great for two things: In-depth film reviews and ranking stuff.

Last week, we started ranking the most important Chiefs players for the 2023 Super Bowl run, going through numbers 41-12 (yes, that’s a weird number. Yes, that’s because of a counting error on my part. Yes, that’s a little sad). Today, we’re going to go through the remaining 11 most important players of 2023.

So what does “most important” mean? It means, for what we’re doing today, how much that player matters in pursuit of a Super Bowl this season. Included in calculating that is the player’s ability (duh), position, depth around him, role on and off the field, and more. One way of thinking about this is asking the following question; If this player were to vanish into thin air tomorrow, how much would it harm the Chiefs’ chances of winning the Super Bowl?

I can say very honestly that I didn’t expect this to be such an illuminating project.

When I set out to rank the “most important” Chiefs players of the 2023 season, I figured it would be a lot of fun looking at where various pieces fit in. I did not expect to be surprised by anything, though, or learn anything very new about the roster.

I was wrong. In the process of trying to sift through the most important Chiefs, I found the decisions becoming awfully tough much sooner than I expected. Further, I ended up with multiple players (the whole LB group, Noah Gray, Mike Danna, Bryan Cook, and Trey Smith among them) far lower than I expected them to be.

What should I take away from that? Well, that’s up for interpretation. But from my perspective, one thing that a person COULD take away is that the Chiefs roster, as a whole, is significantly deeper than I’d realized prior to going through it spot by spot. There are solid players pretty deep at nearly every position group, with perhaps the sole exception being a ton of unproven players at wide receiver.

Another thing that I took from this list was that there are several players (like Bolton and Danna) whose importance may take a step backward from 2022 to 2023. That tells me (if one chooses to view it in an optimistic way) that the defensive side of the ball in particular has a chance to be better this season than last year. Which, considering they won the Super Bowl, is at the very least interesting.

All right, time to get to it. Let’s now discuss the most important 11 players to the Chiefs’ Super Bowl chances in 2023. Similar to last week’s Part 1, please be nice to me if some of these rankings seem nonsensical to you. But I’ll do my best to provide a semi-coherent explanation for each spot from here on out.