What matters and what doesn't at Chiefs training camp; 2025 edition
Reviewing what to pay attention to and what is fluff during a time with a LOT of fluff.
Football is back!
Every offseason, the first snaps of training camp feels like we’ve found an oasis after months of wandering through a desolate wasteland that doesn’t have a drop of water football.
I’ve written many times about how much I love this time of the year. It’s a time where optimism reigns and every team feels like a contender (or at least on the right path). That optimism, combined with the lack of actual football for months upon months, causes us to absolutely devour every single training camp clip or image we get. This is especially the case when there’s a major storyline to follow, like rookie left tackle Josh Simmons fighting for a starting spot or Patrick Mahomes’ desire to re-awaken the deep ball in Kansas City (we’ll come back to both of those things).
With the long gap between any “real” football news, it’s easy to treat every piece of information we hear, as well as every video clip of practice, as wildly important. Every tweet sends us into a frenzy of excitement or into the depths of despair. The reality is, of course, that much of it is fluff. So many of the storylines we follow throughout training camp, especially early, become forgotten as preseason and then the regular season begin.
That’s because the reality is that glorified practices don’t hold nearly as much meaning as we want to ascribe to them in our thirst for football news/content. But MAN do we want them to mean more.
And so several times now, I’ve written here about what matters and what doesn’t during training camp as a primer to help you (and me) try to stay on track during this time of year. I want to reiterate that again today. It’ll be a lot of the same general ideas as previous years (so some of this will feel familiar), but I’ll try to tailor it to some of the storylines you’re sure to be following right now.
Things That Don’t (usually) Matter
Let’s start with this list, because even though it’s shorter, it actually includes a lot more of the content that we receive this time of year.
Individual plays during practice
During camp, we’re in an unusual situation where practices aren’t televised but there are plenty of media bodies (and a decent number of fans) present. Because of that, most of the information that we get is in the form of live-tweeting about individual plays made through the course of a practice. That makes every play feel even MORE important to a fanbase starving for news. And why shouldn’t these plays matter? After all, these are pros practicing against pros, so shouldn’t it matter when one of them makes a great (or bad) play?
Not really, no.
There are a lot of reasons individual plays don’t tell you a whole lot about a player. For starters, well… it’s one play. Every single player in the history of the NFL has some great plays on their resume. They also have some absolutely awful ones too. That’s going to happen, especially during practice. Assigning much meaning to a great catch, or really rough rep in pass pro, etc, is looking for more meat than actually exists based on a singular play.
Additionally, and much more importantly, as fans we don’t know wat players are working on during drills or even during team scrimmage sessions. Patrick Mahomes famously threw a bunch of picks early in his first training camp as a starter. The reason? He was seeing what he could get away with in the pros, trying to nail down exactly how narrow or wide those windows would be at this level.
That’s what practice is for… working on various aspects of your game. And sometimes, I think, in our desire to gather meaningful information we ignore that. This is especially true when we really, really, really want each rep to mean something. But the short story is without knowing what the player is supposed to be working on, it’s dangerous to assign too much meaning to success or failure over a few plays (now, if it’s a BUNCH of plays that may be different, but I’ll come back to that).
It also has to be remembered that the context of what is occurring in a practice rep matters a great deal. Take this “play” for example:
(Price has been posting a lot of videos from training camp if you’re interested in following him on Twitter)
People are desperate to hear about how Simmons is doing in his first training camp, and it makes sense given his potential importance to the 2025 season. But if you pay attention to what is occurring in this rep, you realize quickly that there’s no much to see here. The Chiefs are practicing a play action rollout the opposition direction of Simmons and Danna. So other than perhaps saying “hey, Simmons looks like he’s moving well with that first lateral step,” there’s nothing to really review hear. Danna has to hold his edge for a moment, but the ball is clearly already going the other way, so there’s really no real 1x1 pass pro or run block rep occurring here.
The short story is that yes, we want to see videos of guys making nice catches… and shout out to you, Tyquan Thornton, for generating the most buzz today with a nice extension on a ball from Mahomes.
(Shout out to Sports Radio 810, who are also providing videos from camp if you want to follow them)
But the short story is individual plays, on their own, don’t mean much in training camp.
Practices without Pads
I’ll say this the same way I always do; Football without pads is basically a different sport than football with pads.