In the wake of the midnight firings this week of Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach, Josh McDaniels and General Manager Dave Ziegler, Chiefs fans can rest easy they have two of the best at the helm of their franchise in Andy Reid and Brett Veach.
Las Vegas Owner, Mark Davis, probably the strangest NFL Billionaire in the league, made sweeping changes this week. On Halloween, he fired both his head coach, Josh McDaniels, and their General Manager, Dave Ziegler. The move is a bit shocking considering the frugal nature of Davis that he would fire them at this point in the season.
He’s on the hook for their remaining salaries, McDaniels through the 2027 season, and Ziegler through the 2026 season. In the interim, the Raiders will place Linebackers Coach, Antonio Pierce in the catbird seat, until Davis can make a pitch for Deion Sanders.
In Kansas City, some anxious Chiefs fans were upset with the team’s 24-9 loss to the Broncos on Sunday. In fact, with Kansas City passing on adding any acquisitions at the trade deadline, some fans felt that Veach was blind to the holes on the roster.
Let’s be honest some Kansas City fans are spoiled. As a Fifty-Year survivor between Super Bowl Wins, one meaningless loss to the Denver Broncos does not make Andy Reid a bad coach, nor Brett Veach a bad general manager.
Might I remind you the Chiefs have won two of the last four Super Bowls, they have hosted the AFC Title Game in Kansas City for FIVE consecutive years, and they’ve won SEVEN straight AFC West Titles. Yet, some want to run Veach out of town because he didn’t add DeAndre Hopkins at the trade deadline.
I get fans want to win all the time, and with a generational quarterback in Patrick Mahomes expectations remain very high. However, the 17-game NFL Season is long, and teams have ups and downs.
The Chiefs didn’t play well last week. It wasn’t because their receivers played a bad game, it wasn’t because Mahomes was dealing with the flu, they lost because for sixty minutes the Denver Broncos made the plays on the field the Chiefs didn’t. Nothing more or less!
When you have a team as talented as the Chiefs, the physical and mental grind of the regular season falls somewhere between a job and having fun. Everyone knows the AFC West is a weak division. Yet, when the four combatants face one another, the games are generally close.
Division games used to be the measuring stick for your team. For the Chiefs division games, are a precursor to post-season games. In fact, they are an exercise in putting the players in a position, to make plays in key moments to win games and not lose them; like what they’ll face in January and February.
Thus far the Chiefs offense has struggled, and the game plans have been very basic. Head Coach, Andy Reid, and Offensive Coordinator, Matt Nagy, understand they have some young receivers, who are struggling with route running, catching the ball, and playing the necessary improv ball Mahomes demands from his offensive teammates.
In time, that will improve. Yet, some were upset the team didn’t trade for a veteran wide receiver. The problem in doing so was the cap restrictions facing the Chiefs this year. The other, which nobody talks about, is the willingness of another NFL team to help the Chiefs by giving them one of their best assets, clearly, they weren’t.
Had Veach been willing to hand out a plethora of draft picks, perhaps he would have landed a top-flight receiver.
The assault on Veach is unfair. He’s built two different teams that have won Super Bowls. In the last three years, he’s rebuilt the offensive line, the defensive line, and the entire secondary, mostly via the NFL draft.
It’s clear this off-season his goal will be to fix the receiver room and add another tight end.
To those who understand the aspects of building a roster with a salary cap, I assure you it’s not easy. Veach inherited what could be called cap Armageddon when he replaced John Dorsey as General Manager. He was hamstrung for two years, digging out of the cap hell and dead money on the books Dorsey left behind, thus he couldn’t make the kinds of moves he wanted.
When the books cleared and the cap fell on the good side of the ledger, he was more aggressive.
In 2024 and beyond, the Chiefs cap space has plenty of room to rebuild parts of the offense. That’s the case because, in rebuilding the defense with young players, that will allow more aggressive tactics, when it comes to free agency next year.
Despite all that, fans still don’t get it. They forget they have a Two-Time Super Bowl Winning Head Coach, strong ownership in Clark Hunt, and talent on both sides of the ball that can overcome any weakness because they don’t panic.
On Tuesday afternoon, Veach didn’t panic and stayed the course. On Tuesday Night, Mark Davis panicked and fired his hand-picked guys to defeat the Chiefs, when in reality the problem lies not with them, but within Davis himself.
So Chiefs fans let’s all feel grateful today we will never be as inept a franchise as the Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders.
