Who will step up? Examining the Chiefs' wide receiver room

Juju and Hardman are gone. Toney is hurt. Who is going to fill the void?

I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but the Kansas City Chiefs are short on proven wide receivers this season.

We may or may not have talked about this here. All the way back in March, for example. And again in June, when looking at the overall roster moving up or down. And yet again recently when ranking the most valuable players to Kansas City’s attempt at defending its title.

You all know the story by now, so I’ll say it quickly; The Chiefs have exactly one player on the roster who has proven himself to be able to provide even slightly above-average production at the NFL level. That’s Marquez Valdes-Scantling, who is a solid deep threat who can punish teams for playing single high but is not a WR1 or even a high-level WR2 in an ideal world.

Beyond him? Reid has a bunch of young guys or veterans who haven’t caught on as full-time players at the NFL level. They lost Juju Smith-Schuster (101 targets in the regular season last year) and Mecole Hardman (34 targets in 8 games) to free agency, and those targets will have to go somewhere. One of the reasons people assumed the Chiefs would go after DeAndre Hopkins was that (as we’ve said before here) while the ceiling of the WR room is solid, the floor is… frighteningly low.

With news of Kararius Toney’s newest injury hitting early this week, that floor looks even lower at this point. Toney is anticipated to be out until the start of the season, and there’s of course some concern as to whether or not he’ll be available (or 100% effective) at that point.

That news brings to the surface one of the fears Chiefs fans had heading into this season; That Reid/Veach were relying too much on a player who has struggled with injuries throughout his career. With him potentially out of the picture for a time, they’re now left with MVS, Richie James, Justin Watson, and a bunch of young receivers attempting to break through (that list no longer includes John Ross, who appears to be retiring).

So who is the most likely to step up? Let’s take a look at the group they have available at the moment (leaving out MVS, who we know is a solid veteran that’ll help the offense), what we’ve heard about them in camp (keeping in mind that we’re talking about non-padded practices so far), and how likely I think it is that they’ll be the one to step in and fill the void left by Toney’s injury and the free agency departures.

To make it a bit more spicy, let’s go in order from least likely to most likely… just for fun. (EDIT- an earlier version said most likely to least likely. I blame Brisco)