He’s more fit, leaner and a big key to the Chiefs’ offensive resurgence in 2026
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Player rehabbed from his most serious knee injury with minicamp as a checkpoint.
- He skipped some summer drills but did enough to suggest a Week 1 return.
- The player's progress mirrors the Patrick Mahomes story arc described this year.
A mandatory minicamp offered a checkpoint, of sorts, for a player rehabbing from the most serious knee injury of his life. He didn’t participate in every drill over the summer practices, but he did enough to tease that a Week 1 timetable might just be within reason.
It’s the Patrick Mahomes story arc this year.
But it perfectly describes another player a year earlier.
Josh Simmons occupied all the attention 365 days ago, you might recall — the first-round left tackle who fell in the NFL Draft because of concerns over his knee injury but the player most capable of improving a weak link in the Chiefs’ offense.
The Mahomes injury has kept Simmons — and everyone else, for that matter — under the radar this offseason. But his value to the offense hasn’t changed. In fact, the data from last season demonstrates just how valuable he remains to the entire operation.
At first glance, head coach Andy Reid remarked with a grin Thursday, Simmons looked” pretty good.”
At first glance to the rest of us, he also looked, well, different.
Simmons has clearly spent some time in the gym this offseason and is noticeably more fit — and noticeably more lean. He says he weighs 285-290 pounds, though he looks on the smaller side of that, with the plan to build back to 300 by training camp in six weeks. He weighed 317 pounds at the NFL Scouting Combine ahead of last year’s draft.
In any other profession, we’re not talking about whether he might be too small. In any other profession, for the matter, it’d be unusual to be talking about this at all.
In this one? It stands out.
If Simmons is indeed at 285 pounds, or even 290, he would be the lightest regular starting left tackle over the last five years, per the available tracking on Pro Football Reference. Among the tackles who have been weighed at the NFL Combine, none in the last nine years stepped on the scale lighter than 290 pounds.
Only one in the last two decades has been lighter than 290: San Diego State prospect Daniel Brunskill, who had arrived at college as a walk-on ... at tight end. He’s had a long NFL career, but he moved to an interior lineman after his rookie year.
So, the lighter frame is a bit distinctive. It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that it typically isn’t tried.
The real relevance is whether it will affect Simmons’ ability to perform, and that conversation is worth remembering that he operated with a lighter frame after returning for his undisclosed hiatus last year.
“He’s kind of unique character — he’s not a real big guy,” Reid said. “But he’s extremely strong and very athletic. You always talk about leverage as a coach, and he does a pretty good job with that.”
He doesn’t rely on size to win at the line of scrimmage, in other words. He relies on footwork, quickness and athleticism. Those metrics actually could improve if he’s lighter on his feet, but there’s a reason other left tackles carry more weight. Reid noted that Simmons projected to put on weight before camp, even if he also said he doesn’t view it as “as an absolute that that has to take place.”
The weight is actually the backdrop to the more pertinent topic, which is this: Whatever the scale says by Week 1, Simmons needs to be effective, and he needs to be available.
The Chiefs played eight games with Simmons during his rookie year, and they played nine without him — first after he left the team and to conclude the season after he dislocated and fractured his wrist on Thanksgiving in Dallas.
In six games, the Chiefs allowed quarterback pressure rates of 35.5% or higher. Simmons missed all six of those games.
So the instances in which Mahomes was under the most duress were the games in which he had someone other than Simmons protecting his blindside.
In the games he had Simmons, the pressure arrived less frequently, and it came from somewhere else. In the games Simmons missed, the Chiefs not only allowed more pressures, but they allowed a higher percentage of them from left tackle.
It’s a larger pie, and a larger piece of it. The left tackle was responsible for 25.5% of the pressures in the nine games he missed, per PFF data. In the eight he played, that number sat at 20.4%.
He had that kind of impact.
As a rookie.
There are few players on the Chiefs’ roster who can make that significant of an imprint on an offense that needs to take a step forward. The most significant is the one aiming to return from offseason knee surgery in time for Week 1.
The next? It might be the guy who did it a year ago.