Wanya Morris's struggles bring up serious questions about Chiefs left tackles

The Kansas City Chiefs deserve to take the rest of the day and celebrate. With their seventh win in seven games, they're already in rare company as the only unbeaten team in the National Football League, and now they're chasing some all-time franchise records in terms of consecutive victories and best starts to a season.

In Week 8, the Chiefs took care of the Las Vegas Raiders on the road and made themselves comfortable once again at Allegiant Stadium. The result was a 27-20 win for K.C. and a 5.5 game difference between first place (Chiefs) and last place) Raiders in the AFC West through eight weeks.

Moving forward, however, the win over the Raiders brought about some answers along with new questions. That's because better teams than the Raiders would have taken greater advantage of some issues on the part of the Chiefs—and as the season draws closer to the postseason—those issues are going to picked on more and more.

Of course, it's no secret that the Chiefs have general concerns at left tackle. That's true of any team that's made personnel changes to the starting role in the middle of a season. After all, a head coach will only do so if things aren't working out as expected with the presumed starter coming into a new year. For the Chiefs, that was Kingsley Suamataia who proved after a couple of games that he was not quite ready for the role.

Can the Chiefs really take it all the way with this current set of competitors at left tackle?

For the long-term, the Chiefs questions at left tackle aren't official questions—at least not yet. The Chiefs have two primary competitors at the spot with Suamataia and Wanya Morris and both players are far too young and inexperienced for anyone to have reached a conclusion about either's viability to be the team's starter for the long-term picture.

Suamataia was the team's second-round selection in this spring's NFL Draft and was termed a project coming out of Brigham Young. The book on Suamataia was that he came with the requisite strength, size, and athleticism to potentially man the outside at the pro level but he'd need a lot of reps and coaching to make it work.

This is why the Chiefs decided to do two things with Suamataia: First, they gave him every starting rep from the moment he arrived this offseason. That got him first-team work in OTAs, in rookie minicamp, in mandatory minicamp, in training camp, and in preseason games. Secondy, they had a pretty quick hook for him in the regular season and they're now allowing him to learn from a distance instead of handing him over to the wolves too soon.

What this means is that when we ask questions of Morris, who is only in his second season, and Suamataia at Week 8, it doesn't mean we're asking questions about their long-term potential. Rather, the Chiefs are chasing a very specific and very rare opportunity to earn a third-straight Lombardi. And asking questions about left tackle in a history season is entirely appropriate—especially after watching the results on Sunday.

In case you missed it, Morris struggled for much of the game against the Raiders, which is, of course, going to happen most of the time that anyone has to go against Maxx Crosby. That's not an issue with Morris alone; Crosby tends to make most opposing tackles look silly once or several times per game. However, the penalties themselves seemed to cascade all at once and it's here that you realize a player's lack of experience can work against them if the defender is able to gain a mental edge as well.

In a single stretch of 16 plays, Morris was called for holding on three of them, which killed K.C.'s offensive momentum at a critical point of the game and forced the Chiefs' defense to make Herculean efforts along the goal line to stave off the Raiders. Morris was also the one who allowed Mahomes to get hit like this (after which he was seen limping back to the sideline):

The Chiefs ended up sticking with Morris for the rest of the game, which insinuated that they didn't believe they'd get any different results with Suamataia coming in at such a critical time (or working against Maxx Crosby).

Fortunately, the Chiefs walked away with a win, and they're free to celebrate that now, but there are real questions going forward about an important position and whether or not they want to stick with the youngsters or bring in some help. The NFL's trade deadline not for another week or more which means K.C. has some time to add some veteran aid if that's what the situation calls for.