Catching up with former Chiefs WR Danan Hughes

Given that sort of brotherhood and camaraderie, I’m assuming that’s what makes walking away the hardest.

Absolutely. You spend more time with each other than you do with your families. Then when you add in that everybody is breaking their bodies down and putting their livelihood on the line, you build a bond that’s unbreakable. That’s what you miss when you leave the game of football. The games are just the icing on the cake. Everything else—the workouts, the grind, the blood and sweat and tears, the surgeries and treatments—you’re doing all of that with at least one other player.

Even to this day, I can look at Keith Cash or Chris Penn or Tim Grunhard or Will Shields and feel an extra closeness with those guys because I know what they went through for me as brothers and teammates. They went into that with me, so I’ll always have that appreciation for and bond with those guys.

You mentioned some of those fellow captains that are Hall of Famers, like Montana. Did you know in the moment how rare it was to play with Hall of Famers?

I think I actually thought about it more later in my career than I did in the beginning. As a rookie, you’re just trying to make the team, make sure you’re not a liability. If Joe throws a pass to you, God forbid that you drop it. You don’t want to be that guy. [Laughs] When Marcus is running the ball, you don’t want to be the guy who missed the block. You realize you’re playing with greatness, so you have to be accountable there. If there’s such a thing as extra effort, you have to be prepared to give it.

Later in my career you get to look back, especially afterward, and you think, “Wow, my first catch was in the last Chiefs home playoff game that we won against the Steelers.” That was my first catch ever. One of my first touchdowns was from Marcus Allen on a reverse pass. Those are things you can’t sneeze at, so I’ve looked back afterward and felt it was amazing to be able to play with and contribute with those guys.

I’d love to hear your favorite story from playing at Arrowhead.

One of my favorites is being a part of one of the last games in the NFL where the home team was almost penalized for crowd noise. That was against the Denver Broncos. I watched it on YouTube a couple weeks ago. Being a part of that mania was insane.

How do you like the Chiefs chances in 2017?

On one side, the popular thing to say is that generally speaking is that nearly every team except for a few are 6-10 teams that could be 10-6. To me that describes 28 of the 32 teams every year. From there it depends on strength of schedule and injuries and whose rookies played bigger than most rookies. For the Chiefs, there are some questions out there, such as whether Derrick Johnson is going to be back to full strength. Can they recover from losing Dontari Poe? Who will be the corner opposite Marcus Peters that can be dependable? The biggest question is the receivers.

I think the incredible home field advantage having 8 games at Arrowhead, there’s no doubt they can win at least 6 of those. So I’d have to say that they can be a 10-6 team because they have to be able to win half of their road games. That’s how I look at them every single year. Even when they won 13 games or won the division, the next year I think that it only takes a couple breaks to win another 13 games or go 9-7.