The Kansas City Chiefs put together the NFL's most explosive offense over the past three or four years. Led by Patrick Mahomes, they sure made the most of Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill wreaking havoc downfield.
Now, one of the league's top-tier trios will be no more, as they shockingly traded Hill to the Miami Dolphins, where he went on to become the highest-paid wide receiver in the history of the league.
And, as much as the Chiefs would've loved to keep Cheetah on board for years to come, they just couldn't afford to do it from a salary cap standpoint. That, forced Andy Reid's team to cut ties with him and allow him to cash in on a huge payday somewhere else.
The Chiefs Needed Cap Space, Hill Wanted Another Opportunity
“You can handle it any way you want to handle it. We handled it the way we did there,” Reid said, per ProFootballTalk. “We felt like Tyreek deserved an opportunity. We came in aggressive and then after we got to a point, we just said, ‘Hey, listen, in this day and age, you have issues that you have to deal with with the cap,’ so we felt like it was better to allow him to go ahead and be traded. You can go different routes. You can play hard ball with a player and do that, or you can kind of go about the way I did. Or we did.”
They're Still Confident In Their Ability To Compete
The Chiefs still believe they have enough talent in their ranks to make a deep playoff run. Per Reid, they'll continue to be competitive for as long as Mahomes is running and gunning, although they need to add more talent:
“Obviously, Patrick’s a big part of that (belief the team can remain competitive),” Reid said. “You want to surround him with good players, but that’s a sticky question, because we did try to sign Tyreek at a certain cost. Once it gets past that, now you can see what we’re doing here with the players we brought in, and we feel they’re very good football players. So we’ll see. I mean the end result is going to be what takes place during the season, but (GM) Brett’s building this thing back where we feel comfortable that we can go win on Sundays.”
The Chiefs added JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling to try and fill Hill's void in the offense. Even so, they may no longer be the team to beat in what will be football's toughest division.
