Arrowhead Pride
Using data from well over 100 mock drafts from this offseason, we try to predict what Kansas City will do.
During 2024’s offseason, we’ve revealed players projected to the Kansas City Chiefs in 112 mock drafts from various sources around the Internet — most of them from national writers. The vast majority were covered in our daily Arrowheadlines feature. In those instances, we simply showed which college player went to Kansas City in that mock.
But 14 of them were covered in individual Arrowhead Pride articles, in which we provided some local analysis of the writers’ pick — and also updated readers on the results of the mocks presented so far.
Now that we’ve reached Draft Day, let’s examine all the data.
Is this the final word on the direction the Chiefs will take with their first pick on Thursday night? Maybe. But maybe not.
This is now the fourth season that we have tracked mock drafts. The experience has taught us that the data can provide some insight into what will happen — and that just like any other draft prediction, it can also get things wrong. But in each one of these seasons, the data has given us at least some solid information — and a year ago, it correctly predicted the Chiefs would take defensive end Felix Anudike Uzomah at the end of the first round.
But to reach that conclusion, we had to remember a lesson we’ve learned during this process: we have to pay attention to how the data changes over time.
In 2024, there were two significant milestones. One of them was on March 18.
An overwhelming majority of the mocks we covered through St. Patrick’s Day had Kansas City selecting a wide receiver; defensive tackle was a distant second. In early March — after Xavier Worthy had become the fastest player clocked at the NFL Scouting Combine at Indianapolis — the Texas speedster rocketed to the top of our charts.
But on March 18, picks projected to the Chiefs began reflecting two new realities: that defensive tackle Chris Jones would return to the team in 2024 — and that free agent Hollywood Brown was headed to the team’s wide receiver room.
These tables show that during this period — which lasted about two weeks — picks were almost evenly divided between wide receiver and offensive tackle. A trio of tackles shared top billing — along with Texas wideout Adonai Mitchell — as Worthy’s star faded.
But on March 31, Kansas City’s second-year wideout Rashee Rice was involved in an automobile accident in Dallas. The immediate read of the situation was that the promising young player could miss the whole season after driving one of two luxury sports cars that were racing each other — and then caused an accident.
As we see here, mock drafts immediately began projecting wide receivers to the Chiefs more often — but still not as often as earlier in the offseason. Since the incident, Mitchell, Georgia wideout Ladd...
