Tyreek Hill, Sammy Watkins will be good for the Chiefs secondary

One way to get better at your craft is to practice with the best and the Kansas City Chiefs secondary is doing exactly that in training camp.

The excitement has been building all offseason long for the Kansas City Chiefs offense. From the signing of Sammy Watkins to the torch-passing to Patrick Mahomes to just knowing that Kareem Hunt and Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce will only get better, the Chiefs are absolutely loaded.

What’s been lost in that focus is how good a team’s offense can be for the defense—not in the way that a good offense releases the pressure for the defense to win games. Instead, it’s in the day-to-day battles, best exhibited in the preseason as fans come to watch players go up against one another each day at the height of competition. They’re playing for their very jobs.

It’s one thing for a young cornerback like, say, Tremon Smith to learn from the Chiefs coaches. A small-school prospect, Smith was the Chiefs sixth round pick and Dave Toub called him the second fastest player on the team after wide receiver Tyreek Hill. The raw talents are considerable and readily apparent, but the learning curve will be the thing that either keeps him as a reach or pushes him to rightly apply his talents at the highest level of football he’ll ever find.

Smith will help himself by learning the playbook. He will also do well to stay at the peak of his conditioning, follow any and all nutritional advice, hit the weight room regularly, study film as much as possible, hang with his teammates and listen to everything his coaches are trying to tell him. Those are all well and good and important. But for the Chiefs secondary, it goes a bit further than that.

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Every day on the field, they have to try to look good for those same coaches (and apply everything they’ve learned) in real live exhibitions against a group of weapons that have been called the NFL’s very best. That aforementioned collection of All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce, league-leading rusher Kareem Hunt, the NFL’s fastest man (and secretly elite wide receiver) Tyreek Hill, and new addition Sammy Watkins has been praised across the NFL all offseason long. For the Chiefs defensive backs, those are the talents with which they’re forced to practice.

Earlier this week, new corner addition David Amerson said it well, “If you can run with a guy like that then you can run with anybody in the league. It definitely gets me better.”

This is true in any scenario, obviously. We all feel the heat of competition from time to time in all aspects of life and the presence of someone truly great at what they do will either deflate us or inspire us. While some of us have the choice to purposefully not get better, that’s not the case for these Chiefs. In a matter of weeks, the active roster will drop from 90 to 53, which means 37 will be unemployed. That’s some serious motivation for players who have the ability to get a lot better by going against the NFL’s best day after day.

The good news is that a secondary that seems suspect for a lot of us, myself included, can improve just by going up against the likes of Hill and Watkins so often. David Amerson has already showed up strong against Hill in the preseason and that in itself has improved fan confidence in that signing even in just the first full week of training camp. Kendall Fuller has also shown why he’s so effective inside.

Here’s hoping the defense’s ability can rise to meet the offensive potential. if so, this Chiefs team could be much more dangerous than anyone predicted.

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