Is the Demetrius Harris experiment over for the Kansas City Chiefs?

With news of Demetrius Harris’s arrest for marijuana possession, is his time in Kansas City finished?

It began as an experiment. John Dorsey, the Kansas City Chiefs general manager, has a penchant for searching high and low for talent. There’s Canadian imports like Weston Dressler and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif. Then there are projects like Demetrius Harris, the former basketball player converted into a tight end. So far, the latter experiment was going quite well, as the end of last season showed that Harris’s talents were finally being utilized on the field.

Maybe that experiment is now over. The Chiefs likely felt set at tight end heading into the offseason, but news of Demetrius Harris’s arrest for marijuana possession not only puts his ability to play in jeopardy (as he faces a potential suspension) but there’s the whole public relations issue of this, not to mention the broken trust, for the team to address. For a non-starting role player, getting rid of Harris is a much easier proposition to stomach than, say, Travis Kelce.

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Speaking of Kelce, the Chiefs can feel good about their starter at tight end after his breakout Pro Bowl season. After that, however, is more potential than actual production. Harris has long been a preseason favorite, a large red zone target with great athleticism and elite size, and he came on near the end of the season with a career-high 9 targets in the second to last game of the regular season against the Denver Broncos. It seemed as if Alex Smith was learning to trust his second tight end, and dreams of potential mismatches in the red zone were easy to conjure.

However, those dreams have never quite materialized and the team has a chance to officially move on from Harris if they like. There are plenty of tight ends to like in this year’s draft class, and the team also has young players like Ross Travis and James O’Shaughnessy waiting in the wings. In other words, losing Harris is not going to make or break the offense. If anything, it will just hurt Dorsey to know that an experiment the team has been developing for years was the source of his own undoing.

The Chiefs will likely make some sort of statement in the near future about Harris’s arrest, but it’s likely to be a neutral statement that says they will wait to see how the legal side of this plays out first. The team might also wait and see on any league punishment before deciding their own course of action. However, if they’re concerned about public perception, losing Harris is only a loss of promise, not product, and they can capture the same possibility in another player in the upcoming draft.

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