The moments of appreciation don’t come around too often for the training staff of an NFL team all too often, so let’s take a minute to pay tribute to Rick Burkholder, Vice President of Sports Medicine and Performance for the Kansas City Chiefs, and the rest of his staff. They did a tremendous job last year in keeping the Chiefs players ready for the long road ahead.
According to the Buffalo News, the Chiefs were the third healthiest team—at least when measuring the starters—in the National Football League last year with a combined 40 games lost among the team’s first-string performers. That came just behind the New England Patriots (23) and Buffalo Bills (36).
For some perspective, the Detroit Lions finished as the most unfortunate team in the league when it comes to injuries and games lost with 134 overall. That’s the equivalent of 8 starters being forced to sit out every single game for an entire 17-game regular season.
The KC Chiefs were among the league’s healthiest teams in 2021.
It’s that last stat that reminds us of the difficulty of the job facing a figure like Burkholder and his staff. While technology and medical advances have made some aspects of the job easier, the NFL itself is intent on making an already taxing season even longer than ever, and it’s only a matter of time until the league is pushing 18 regular-season games with regular international exhibitions.
For the Chiefs to end up so healthy with their starting lineups is a matter of luck and preparation. Some injuries, after all, cannot be avoided. It’s in the physical nature of the game as well as the nature of sports in general. When a player goes down with an ACL injury simply because he planted his foot awkwardly, it’s impossible to pin that blame on anyone. That said, for a team to have nearly 100 more games lost due to injury than another makes clear the importance of an excellent training staff.
Burkholder has been tied to the hip of Andy Reid for as long as he has been a head coach, with his first head athletic trainer assignment coming with the Philadelphia Eagles back in 1999. He’s been with Reid ever since, which means this is his tenth season with the Chiefs in ’22.