When it comes to making deals, the K.C. Chiefs have certainly had their fair share of trades over their several decades in the AFL and the NFL. But surprisingly, they’ve made very few outright horrible trades over that long span of time.
While some trades haven’t worked out and others have been lopsided, it’s hard to find many trades that proved to be completely devastating to the team. In fact, there’s really only one such transaction in Chiefs history—that we can think of at least—which speaks well for the various decision-makers in the organization over the years.
The Chiefs have employed bad general managers in their past. Let’s not mince words there. But even those GMs were mostly bad at picking in the draft or just had trades that didn’t measure up rather than getting fleeced.
We decided to take a look back at the worst trades in Chiefs history to see what surfaced and it was actually hard to decide on some of these. Some fans might want to put the Marcus Peters trade in the mix, but the Chiefs aren’t the only team to trade Peters and Juan Thornhill is still writing his story as part of the return (as is Armani Watts, we suppose). The Chiefs have also won a Super Bowl since then.
Other blockbusters ended up working out fairly well. The Chiefs traded away Jared Allen to the Minnesota Vikings but found several starters, including Jamaal Charles, in the returning batch of draft picks. They traded away a high pick to the Pittsburgh Steelers that turned out to be Troy Polamalu, but they drafted Larry Johnson with the return. You get the picture.
With these trades listed as potential entrants, we now turn to the worst three, and instead of building up, we’ll just go straight for the jugular and ask, “What was Hank Stram thinking?”
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