Real or Fantasy: Chiefs' 2023 training camp storylines

Every year, narratives form. Let's try to sift through which ones are real and which ones are not.

It’s August, and the pads have come on for your favorite football team.

You know what that means? Well, it means Chiefs football is right(ish) around the corner. But it also means that we get to play “real or fantasy” again!

What is real or fantasy? It’s a game I play every offseason. What does it entail? Here’s how I’ve said it previously:

As camp goes on and turns to preseason and then regular season, many of the storylines that develop during camp are stamped out as nothing more than a pipe dream… The key is to try and figure out which of them are pointing towards something real and which of them are nothing but a wisp and a vapor.

With that in mind, let’s take the opportunity to play “real or fantasy,” in which I’m going to go through some of the main storylines early in Chiefs camp and give my best shot as to whether they point towards something solid or something that will be nothing but a faded memory by midseason (or even early season).

You can find last year’s article here, and you can find 2021’s article here. It’s always a great deal of fun to try and figure out how things will play out as the season moves along. And something that’s even more fun is that this year, with multiple articles in the rear view mirror, I can look back and see what I got right and what I got wrong (yay! I think?).

So we’re going to do two things today. First, we’ll look at some of the biggest emerging storylines that have emerged from camp and decide whether we think they are real or a fantasy.

Last year’s storylines included the “new” Frank Clark, the Isiah Pacheco hype train, Skyy Moore showing out in camp, Justin Watson doing the same, the rookie defensive wave, MVS having drop issues, Juju Smith-Schuster being WR1, and then a lightening round of multiple other subjects.

This year we’ve got young WR’s showing out, Drue Tranquill being loved by Spags, Chris Jones being gone still, Noah Gray being a majestic white horse, yet another rookie RB making waves, and a bunch more. There’s a LOT to cover here.

After we look at this years “real or fantasy” topics, we’ll take a look at what I got right (and wrong) from last year’s article. Let’s have some fun, shall we?