Should the Kansas City Chiefs draft a first round wide receiver?

The Kansas City Chiefs are preparing for a very important offseason. The team was one bad half of football away from appearing in their third straight Super Bowl. Now the roster needs some smart turnover to ensure they can not only stay one of the league’s top contenders, but come out on top and hoist the Lombardi Trophy once again.

I think most fans agree that the most pressing need is to revamp the defense. The Chiefs have already released Anthony Hitchens and they have decisions to make with other key players like Frank Clark, Tyrann Mathieu, Charvarius Ward, and Melvin Ingram. Depending on what happens with those players they could be looking at a major makeover of both the defensive front and the secondary. Despite all of that, is it possible that the Chiefs may target another elite offensive playmaker in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft?

If your gut reaction to that question is a resounding no, hear me out for a second. I’m not here to convince you that reloading on the defensive side isn’t the top priority this offseason. I’m in total agreement with that. However, I feel like we’ve seen that Brett Veach likes to enter the draft with his biggest needs already met so that he doesn’t have to gamble on hitting on his first round pick to fix it. We saw that with the trade for Frank Clark and we saw it again last season with the trade for Orlando Brown.

Should the Chiefs make a first-round investment at wide receiver?

I believe that Veach is going to want to come out of free agency with most of his defensive starters intact. That way he can take more of a best player available approach to the draft instead of potentially reaching to fill a specific need. Does that mean that the Chiefs won’t draft for defense in the first round? Of course not, but if the Chiefs find themselves on the board in the first round and the best player on their board is a wide receiver I don’t think they’ll hesitate to pull the trigger, especially considering how they have struggled to fill their number two wideout spot since Sammy Watkins left town.

The interesting thing about this year’s wide receiver class is that there isn’t a consensus top guy. I looked at nine different sets of wide receiver rankings and in them there were four different guys that were listed as the top wideout in them. Those four being Garrett Wilson, Drake London, Jameson Williams, and Treylon Burks. On top of that, there were two other receivers that finished in the top 32 overall, Chris Olave and Jahan Dotson, with some rankings even having those two over some of the top four guys.

Over the past five seasons there has been an average of 3.6 wide receivers taken in the first round. That average was raised by strong classes the past two seasons with 5 taken in the first round last year and 6 taken in the first round in 2020. So history says there is a good chance that one of those top six guys will still be on the board when KC is on the clock. Plus, with how there is such discrepancy in the order of the top wideouts, this season it’s not impossible that any of them could fall to the Chiefs. So I thought I would give Chiefs fans a quick preview of all six wideouts and how they might fit in KC.

So let’s start with the consensus #6 guy and work our way up to #1.