The Kansas City Chiefs decided to get something for Wanya Morris earlier this summer after realizing he was no longer in their plans for the 2026 season. The Atlanta Falcons came to the same conclusion about Morris two months later. Now, Morris is a free agent once again.
The surprising news that the Falcons had released Morris broke on Sunday, per ESPN reporter Jeremy Fowler, as part of Atlanta's overall efforts to whittle down their 90-man offseason roster to the mandated amount of 53 players to start the year.
The Falcons and Chiefs reached a deal for Morris back in June, a trade involving a swap of day three assets in the 2026 NFL Draft. The Chiefs gave up Morris and a seventh-round choice in exchange for the Falcons' sixth-round pick. The deal felt like a win-win for both sides, since Morris looked like he wasn't going to make the roster while the Falcons needed veteran help in the wake of losses on the offensive front.
At the time, however, the Chiefs' trade of Morris felt like a surprise given how tenuous the position looked late in the season. It was only six months prior that the Chiefs were leaning on Esa Pole and Chu Godrick to start actual games—multiple games. In June, the forecast had changed considerably with the emergence of Khalil Benson as a rookie free agent to go with Pole, Godrick, and Ethan Driskell behind Josh Simmons and Jaylon Moore up front. It was a numbers game.
Interestingly, the forecast has changed again for the Chiefs at preseason's end. Just two months after trading Morris in mid-June, general manager Brett Veach sent away a draft choice to the Baltimore Ravens for the rights to rookie free agent tackle Diego Pounds. The Ole Miss product looked solid in the preseason, and Veach needed to bolster the depth at tackle after watching the miserable overall showing by second-team linemen in the preseason.
If anything, the Morris trade and the Falcons' subsequent release of him only 10 weeks later shows just how mercurial all these things are. The Chiefs went from tackle-needy to tackle-rich and back to needy again in the course of a single offseason. Morris looked like a savvy acquisition for Atlanta only to be cut after other prospects like Ethan Onianwa looked better.
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