The Kansas City Chiefs have successfully completed their 2020 training camp. They have just 12 days to go until the season opener against the Houston Texans at Arrowhead Stadium on Sept. 10. With training camp in the rearview what’s next for the Chiefs? According to Andy Reid, after an off day on Sunday, the Chiefs will begin in-season style practices starting on Monday, Aug. 31.
“So, they get a day off tomorrow and then they’ll be back at it,” Reid told reporters following Sunday’s practice. “We’ll start our in-season-type practices. Not that we’re necessarily working on all Texans, that’s not necessarily what we’re doing, but we’re getting them used to these in-season practices where you have the walkthrough in the morning, the practice in the early afternoon and that kind of routine that they’ll be going through once we start the Texans week. It’s really not different than what we’ve done in the past when we break camp at St. Joe, we come back and we do the same things.”
Reid will be squarely focused on getting veterans and new players accustomed to the weekly practice routines of the regular-season. On the flip side, Brett Veach and his staff will be hard at work, evaluating the roster. They’ll have some tough decisions to make at coming up at 3:00 p.m. CT on Sept. 5, when the NFL requires teams to trim their rosters to 53 players.
Assembling the 53-man roster this season will be different as Veach recently described at length. They won’t have preseason game tape to evaluate players on the roster or outside players that could potentially be available during roster cuts. Instead, they’ll have to rely on the evaluation of coaches, practice tape, and even going back to look at player’s college film to make a final decision.
Thankfully, the Chiefs escaped training camp mostly healthy. They have two players who were sent to injured reserve in Alex Brown and Emmanuel Smith. As of the final practice, only six players were absent from practice.
“Well, we’ve got a couple of guys nicked up, but not much,” Reid said. “But you want to get everybody healthy and ready to go and maintain that through the next less than couple of weeks here before we get ready, but at the same time, stay in good football shape, which they’ve worked hard to put themselves into.”
After the roster decisions are made and the 16-man practice squad is assembled, the team will officially shift their focus to preparing, game-planning and installing plays for their Week 1 matchup.
“Then really, it’s like every first game,” Reid continued. “You’ve got to prepare for a variety of things because you don’t know exactly what menu they’re going to present to you. So, you’ve got to make sure offensively, defensively, special teams that you have as many of the bases covered as you can, and at the same time get yourself ready with whatever you’re going to do. It’s always nice at the end of camp to be able to narrow it down. You have this huge menu that you’re working off with plays on both sides of the ball and all of the sudden now you can kind of focus it in, and it’s almost a relief to the players that they don’t have to memorize 1,000 plays, but you can narrow it down to the base stuff that you’re going to go into the game with.”
The first game preparation is familiar, but it will also be slightly different this season. The Chiefs don’t even have a glimpse of preseason tape to understand the different personnel that their opponent might use. This isn’t the same Texans team than what Kansas City faced in the playoffs en route to Super Bowl LIV. That element of mystery will keep Reid and the Chiefs on their toes as they prepare for the season opener.
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