How unsolicited texts — and a son’s wish — motivated D.J. Humphries to join Chiefs
D.J. Humphries, the latest hope for competency in protecting the most valuable football player on the planet, spent the past 11 months rehabbing from a knee surgery. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the sport, and if you talk to enough players who have come back from ACL injuries, you’ll gather a pretty good indication that it’s a grind.
That wasn’t the tough part for Humphries. That came from the messages.
From others.
And one he had to relay himself.
He knew the injury, which he suffered last December, would cost him his contact with the Arizona Cardinals. They weren’t going to pay $20 million-plus to stash him on the roster for more than half the regular season. They’d have to make alternate plans. They’d have to cut him.
Humphries didn’t want his oldest kid — he has four, including his first-born, Dash, 8 — learning the reality of NFL business from his friends at grade school.
“I didn’t know how to explain it to him,” Humphries said.
But eventually he just came out with it:
“Dad’s going to get fired.”
Humphries had braced himself for a somber reaction.
Dash, though, didn’t flinch.
“I really want you to go to Kansas City,” he said, as Humphries recalled, “so you can play with Patrick Mahomes and you can probably win a Super Bowl.”
Halfway there.
Humphries has completed his first week of practice with the Chiefs ahead of their Black Friday date with the Raiders — you know, just as his son envisioned.
Dash might have been the only one.
The injury precipitated plenty of ideas about what was next, as you’d probably expect. The ideas, though, varied in nature.
Drastically.
The response from his son has stuck with him over the past 11 months, but so have a couple of others. Shortly after the severity of his injury became apparent, a few text messages started to roll in.
Man, you had such a great career.
Or.
What a run.
“I think that was the toughest part about the whole thing — like, people just expect me to tuck it right now,” Humphries said, adding, “It kind of gave me that feeling throughout rehab: OK, thanks. I appreciate that.”
That was the perspective then.
And now?
“I think that was one of the best things that ever could’ve happened for my career,” he said of the texts. “That fire of ‘I got something to prove and I gotta go out and show it every day’ — when you start getting paid and you become a vet, you lose that part of it. So I don’t know if I would’ve had anything happen to make that feeling come back and that fire come up. I think it was a good thing for me, honestly. Crazy to say, but I think it was.”
There’s a lot to be determined about Humphries as things sit now, on the week of Thanksgiving — such as the obvious, to be frank.
Is he in football shape?
How quickly can he learn a playbook that his teammates have been studying for weeks, months or even years?
If he enters a game, how much rust can be expected from a player who not only hasn’t played a competitive game in 11 months but missed all of camp and hasn’t even practiced until this week?
A shoulder shrug. All of it, for now.
But for a man who says he needs this opportunity to fulfill an 11-month ambition, there’s one thing completely known about the Chiefs:
They need help.
The best Patrick Mahomes outing of the season came last week in Carolina, but subpar outside protection spoiled it from becoming even better. Left tackle Wanya Morris and right tackle Jawaan Taylor allowed a combined nine quarterback pressures. I’m not sure how many quarterbacks would have survived that second half in Carolina. Or the middle quarters against Denver two weeks earlier. Or the first three quarters against Cincinnati back in September.
This has been a long-term problem, injected with a mixture of trial-and-error solutions that have leaned heavily toward the latter.
Mahomes has encountered 118 pressures this season, per PFF tracking, which ranks as the seventh most in the NFL. An astounding 32.2% of those have been charged to the left tackle. If you’re wondering how that compares to the rest of the league, no starting quarterback in football has seen that high of a percentage of their pressures charged to left tackle.
There isn’t a team in the NFL blocking better from guard to guard than the Chiefs. It’s a misconception to say their offensive line’s pass protection is a problem. Let’s be honest. The tackles’ pass protection is the problem, and even the bulk of that problem resides on one side.
The question before the Chiefs is whether Humphries, after nearly a year out of the game, is part of that solution.
At least one of his former teammates thought he would be.
As Humphries weighed interest from multiple teams this month, he got a call from Chiefs wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins. The two played together in Arizona. Hopkins opened with a sales pitch before Humphries cut him off.
“I know what’s going on over there,” he interrupted. “I watch TV.”
He didn’t even need to get that far.
It was back in March, six months before the Chiefs would drop another banner on national TV, that Humphries had a conversation with his son to inform him about his next steps.
Or, well, vice versa.