The situation surrounding the Kansas City Chiefs’ rookie wide receiver Jalen Royals remains unsettled. Before Tuesday’s final roster cutdown, there was fear that he would be placed on the team’s Reserve/Injured list as he continued to deal with tendonitis in his knee. That didn’t happen — and more recently, there were reports that the team expected him to be ready for the season opener against the Los Angeles Chargers.
But on Friday, head coach Andy Reid threw some cold water on that.
“Jalen continues
to work to get himself better.” Reid told reporters. “We’ll see how it goes. I mean, it’d be a real rush [to be ready] for this week for sure. So it doesn’t look like he’ll probably make [it] this week, but [he] should be ready to go as we go down the road here.”
NFL teams don’t always count on fourth-round rookies to fill important Week 1 roles — but when they do, it’s often because a veteran player is unavailable. On Wednesday, we learned that wideout Rashee Rice would miss the first six games of the season under his long-anticipated NFL suspension. Royals seems to be the young player the Chiefs believe is best suited to take on Rice’s role — but if he’s unavailable, that responsibility will probably fall to the team’s most senior wide receiver: JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Reid believes the ninth-year veteran will be ready, willing and able to do the job — and that Patrick Mahomes won’t be afraid to throw him the ball.
“He’s in the best shape he’s been in in a long time,” Reid noted of Smith-Schuster. “So he feels very good — and we have a lot of trust in him. But most of all, Patrick has a lot of trust in him. So yeah: he can fill in that role for sure.”
While no NFL head coach wants to be without their top wideout, Reid thinks the team has been able to make the best of a bad situation.
“We had an idea that something was going to happen,” he said. “Whether it was now or later, it [didn’t] necessarily matter — but something was going to happen and it would probably be around that six-game area. And so, we went about business full steam ahead: [we] rotated guys in. Everybody got a chance to play that will have an opportunity to play here.”
And the head coach is, at least, happy that Rice had the opportunity to get some work in before he has to step away from the facility.
“He’ll be away for three weeks,” explained Reid, “and then he’ll be back in the building after that. [He’ll] able to work out here and do everything but practice. Then we’ll get him back after six weeks [in all].
“But we’ve got guys that are capable of playing here. We just have to go out and do it. Not that you don’t miss Rashee — I mean, he’s a heck of a football player. But we have other guys that are good players, too.”
