Chiefs WR Kadarius Toney will get more chances. But he has much to prove after drops
Of all the ways the Chiefs on Thursday demonstrated how precarious their prospects of repeating as Super Bowl champions might be, nothing was more jarring than the disintegration of Kadarius Toney.
His three dropped passes in the Chiefs’ 21-20 opening loss to Detroit, including one that was returned for a touchdown, were as bewildering as they might have been infuriating to fans and coaches.
“That’s just not his thing,” coach Andy Reid said Monday as the Chiefs turned their attention to playing Sunday at Jacksonville. “He’s not a guy that drops balls.”
Moreover, you might remember, the last time Toney played he was a pivotal force in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LVII. He seized the scene by scoring a touchdown to give the Chiefs their first lead of the game (28-27). Later, he uncorked a mesmerizing Super Bowl-record 65-yard punt return to set up another touchdown.
With that, presto, it appeared the enigmatic 2021 first-round draft pick that the New York Giants rather abruptly gave up on had arrived and would begin to reap his vast potential.
He just needed to be in the right situation with the right coaches, it seemed, a point he reiterated after the Super Bowl. When I asked him in the locker room about playing for Reid, he put it this way:
“He gave me opportunity,” Toney said. “I mean, most coaches, anything (goes) wrong, they hissy-fit, cry, complain or whatever, you know? Him, you mess up anything, he’ll come over and crack a joke with you. …
“He’s coming back to you if you mess up anything. He’s just a coach that you want to play for. You want to go out there and do all you can for him.”
That dynamic will be tested anew after a performance so distressing that it’s at least initially easy to wonder if it will have a lasting impact on the Chiefs’ belief in Toney … or even his own in himself.
And compounded with how injury-prone Toney has been, it’s another way his tantalizing talent is asterisked by his volatility until that’s proven otherwise.
The matter of his mercurial focus is further supported by his curious need to keep taunting the Giants and their fans through social media — as he did again while they were en route to a 40-0 loss to Dallas on Sunday night.
So for now, anyway, you could say wild-card underscores the guy nicknamed The Joker, modified to Yung Joka for his rap name.
At 24 years old, he’s both in the early stages of his career but at a crossroads of showing who he really is.
As to his psyche itself, Reid on Monday even used the term “the only way we’re going to get him back (my italicized emphasis) is playing him.”
When I asked Reid to expand on that, he acknowledged he’d felt it necessary to speak directly with Toney “a couple different times” since Thursday. That was evidently both to get a better grasp of what went awry and to offer encouragement.
Toward that end, Reid reiterated something he had said Thursday: that he deserved some blame for over-exposing Toney after he missed all of training camp in St. Joseph with a knee injury and had only returned to practice for a few days since the team returned to Kansas City
While he still believes playing him was important to start him towards regular-season speed, Reid said he had to “look in the mirror” because he didn’t put Toney in the best positions to succeed.
That was especially true later in the game, he said, considering Toney still was working to get his legs back.
Some might think Reid’s assessment to be bordering on disingenuous. But I think it was just a generous but necessary approach geared towards helping Toney move forward by speaking it into existence.
Even if it was subconsciously, no doubt that was part of what Patrick Mahomes wanted to get across after the game, too.
“I have trust in (Toney),” Mahomes said. “He missed a lot of training camp. Obviously, he wanted to play and fought (to) rehab hard so he could play. Stuff is not always going to go your way. Obviously, he would have wanted to catch a few of those in the game.
“But I have trust that he is going to be the guy that I go to in those crucial moments, and he’s going to make the catch and win us some (game) like he did last year.”
Over time with more reps, Mahomes added, “I’m sure that those drops will kind of disappear.”
Wishful thinking, logical … or a little bit of both?
According to research by Newsweek, Toney had dropped a total of four passes on 77 career targets in his first two seasons before doing it three times on Thursday — including the late drop that would have put the Chiefs in game-winning field-goal position.
That seems to affirm Reid’s contention that dropping passes is “just not his deal” and that he’s a “very, very, secure catcher.”
So per Toney’s post-Super Bowl point about Reid “coming back to you if you mess up anything” and Reid’s frequent tendency to do just that with people he believes in, it figures that Toney will get a chance to redeem himself this week.
But it also figures that he’s going to have to earn back some trust, no matter how much Reid and Mahomes want to believe in him.
Even if the performance against the Lions really was foremost about Toney being used in a marquee spot sooner than he was ready for after missing so much preseason time, it still will be up to him to overcome any crisis of confidence that might have caused within.
And to show Reid and Mahomes, among others, that they can count on him.
With so much career potentially in front of Toney, that night could ultimately be seen as a bizarre blip. But this possibility also hovers:
If the rest of his career is anything like the first two-plus seasons, its trajectory won’t be so much an upward arc as one of extreme highs and lows.
Just like the freakish way he can maneuver (see: the 65-yard return) might seem inseparable from his susceptibility to injury, Toney isn’t simply either the player essential to winning the Super Bowl or the guy instrumental to the loss against Detroit.
He’s both, exhilarating and exasperating.
And the challenge ahead for the Chiefs will be how to deal with each aspect while hoping the best version of himself will ultimately emerge. That starts with what he does when Reid presumably comes right back to him this week.