If the Kansas City Chiefs are looking at players who would move the needle, so to speak, then wide receiver Sammy Watkins won’t fit the bill.
Their might have been a point within the last several weeks that Sammy Watkins would have been a solid short-term addition for the Kansas City Chiefs. It wouldn’t have lasted long and it definitely would not have been certain, but there was a window in which the signing would have made sense.
At this point, we’ve jumped into the deep end of the pool and buried the lede here, which is that the Green Bay Packers set Watkins free on Monday. The Packers released Watkins with enough football left in the season that it’s likely he finds a new team soon—possibly one with serious postseason hopes.
For the Packers, Watkins was simply on the wrong side of a lot of categories: age, career trajectory, physical peak. When the season first started, the Packers were young and inexperienced in their wide receiving corps, which is why Watkins got the bulk of his stats in the front end of the year. Then came the familiar injury concerns which have plagued him for his entire career.
After a stint on injured reserve, Watkins came back to a changed landscape among the team’s pass catchers. Christian Watson began to break out. Other vets got healthy. Soon the position looked crowded and no one knew what to tell Watkins anymore. He was no longer needed, thank you very much. On Monday, they made that official.
Back to the Chiefs for a second. It makes sense to ask with a lot of familiar faces whether or not Brett Veach, the team’s general manager, might want to re-sign someone even to the practice squad. Perhaps that’s a good spot for Watkins given his history with the team, the fact that he knows the offense, and could be an asset if things went downhill quickly when it comes to player availability.
Beyond that, however, the Chiefs simply do not need Watkins at this point. Why? He doesn’t move the needle.
The Chiefs aren’t so set at wide receiver that they wouldn’t welcome an upgrade, but Watkins doesn’t represent that in any way. His days of creating separation with the best of them in the NFL are gone, and he’s not even durable going forward. The Chiefs already rode that availability carousel for three years and it was beyond time to get off by the end of his contract.
In the brief span in which Kadarius Toney was out for weeks on end and Mecole Hardman was just landing on injured reserve and perhaps Skyy Moore had to show he can handle a few targets if you trust him, then maybe Watkins would have slid right in for a week or two to smooth things over. Even then, however, the Chiefs have so many mouths to feed that Watkins wasn’t likely to re-sign even then.
Watkins has a nice place in Chiefs history as a vital offensive piece during the team’s second-ever Super Bowl run. He’ll always have those memories and Chiefs fans should cherish him for what he brought during those years. Beyond that, however, Watkins fails to move the needle in any meaningful way on a young team with plenty of options for Patrick Mahomes already in house.