Arrowhead Pride
For much of the season, we thought that playoff seeding would to be on the line when the Kansas City Chiefs hosted the Denver Broncos on Christmas night for the Week 17 edition of “Thursday Night Football.”
Unfortunate developments, however, have stripped this matchup of most of its intrigue.
In Week 15, quarterback Patrick Mahomes was lost for the season with an ACL tear. In the next game, backup quarterback Gardner Minshew also suffered a season-ending knee injury.
As a result, third-string quarterback Chris Oladokun — who has spent the past four seasons on the team’s practice squad — finished Kansas City’s most recent game against the Tennessee Titans. He will now make his first career start against Denver in primetime.
“It’s definitely been crazy,” Oladokun remarked of this sequence of events while speaking to reporters on Tuesday. “Stuff happens fast in the league — people always say that. So it’s been a lot of preparation getting ready for this game. I’m super excited to go out there and show the world what I’ve got.”
The Pittsburgh Steelers selected Oladokun in the seventh round of the 2022 NFL Draft. After being waived at the end of his first training camp, the South Dakota State product signed with the Chiefs’ practice squad. While many Kansas City fans have shifted their focus to the offseason, Oladokun understands the significance of this opportunity.
“It’s something I won’t take lightly,” he promised. “These opportunities don’t come around often — so when you get [one], you’ve got to take [it] and run with it. This is not only a big game for our team, but for me personally. [It’s] a big game in terms of letting the league know what I can do — and letting these coaches know what I can do moving forward [when] having that confidence in me. [So] if something were to happen, they feel confident that I can go out there and execute the game plan.”
On Tuesday, head coach Andy Reid pointed to the work Oladokun has put in while studying Mahomes and working closely with quarterbacks coach David Girardi, expressing confidence that he will be ready with standard preparation.
“He looks forward to every week,” observed the coach. “He prepares himself every week to go, so that’s been an easy transition with the verbiage and such. So he jumps in and gets it. He sits behind the offensive drill there, and they mock it; the two backup quarterbacks mock it as if they’re in. They make the calls to David and then go about it. They stay fresh on that, [so] he’s in a pretty good position that way.”
Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy also highlighted Oladokun’s decision-making against Tennessee.
“One of the very first plays we had,” recalled Nagy, “we had a little jet motion where we were going to try to time it up and snap it on time — [but] the timing was off a little bit. What he did [was] stop the motion, let them...
