It should not bring any of us joy to report the following: Over the past two weeks, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has been on the wrong side of two of the most consequential plays of the team’s season. Kansas City has also started a season 0–2 for the first time since 2014, when Kelce was 25 years old.
His first snap of the year, in the Friday night opener against the Chargers in Brazil, involved a complementary pair of routes run with Xavier Worthy. Kelce, on his podcast, said he was supposed to run his route “at depth” for Worthy, meaning he has to create enough room, and legal traffic, for Worthy to cross underneath him with minimal interference and space to run. Instead, Kelce was battled furiously off the line by perpetual foil Derwin James and slammed into Worthy as he was trying to twist out of the grapple.
This Sunday, on second-and-goal at the beginning of the fourth quarter, Kelce positioned himself well on an in-breaking route against Eagles safety Reed Blankenship. Mahomes released the ball even before it was established that Kelce had an advantageous position. Kelce appeared to turn late, and by the time his hands dropped to catch the low and away ball, Kelce popped it into the air instead of hauling it in. The pass was picked off by rookie Andrew Mukuba. Had it not been for an incredibly athletic play by Chiefs offensive lineman Josh Simmons running down the returner, the play may have directly resulted in a touchdown. Perhaps worse, the Eagles ran a 10-play drive that milked another five-plus minutes off the clock before scoring and putting the game effectively out of reach.
While all players go through peaks and valleys, Kelce will turn 36 in three weeks and is coming off what would universally be considered a down year for him. His yards per target in 2024 dropped by nearly two yards from the year before, which was already the lowest in his 10 full seasons.
The sober and generous take would be that Kelce is naturally coming toward the end of a long career that would decisively have him considered one of the two greatest players to ever grace the tight end position. Like any player—Peyton Manning, Jerry Rice, Ed Reed—physical ability tends to diminish even for those who are generationally gifted. Combine this with the fact that the Chiefs are already threadbare at the pass-catcher positions, and it would be unreasonable to expect him to lead the team in targets on a week-to-week basis effectively. (Kelce led the Chiefs with six targets this week and had four the week before against the Chargers. Hollywood Brown currently leads the team in targets.) That, really, he’s simply trying to make the best of a bad situation and despite the typical offseason chest-pounding that has every athlete claim to arrive in the best shape of his or her life, he’s probably exhausted. That we should also factor in that the season opener was in Brazil of all places, and on nearly every snap—as we mentioned—he was locked in a UFC match against an outstanding safety in James.
The more panicky take would be that perhaps the Chiefs wrongly assumed what they would get out of Kelce—or are misutilizing him altogether. In talking to the team a few years back, it was my understanding that Kelce would evolve into far more of a game manager extension of Mahomes—almost in the same way we’re seeing Cooper Kupp used in Seattle. However, after the opening route against the Chargers in Brazil, I did not see another one that night on which Kelce created an opening for someone else (something he does really well, by the way!) until the third quarter on a third-and-2. Kelce bodied a pair of Chargers backs, making an essential step for Hollywood Brown on a 13-yard gain. Again in the fourth quarter, he walled off a defender, allowing a free release for Isiah Pacheco to catch a ball out of the backfield and rumble for four yards.
On his 37-yard touchdown last week, his blocking fake was flawless (in addition to a very clever design) despite the fact that, on plays prior to that, it seemed like he was having a difficult time getting away from the prying hands of other defenders and converting from actual blocker to available receiver.
In that way, we have a kind of major struggle developing. If Kelce is not simply covering for Worthy, and is correct in his assessment that he ran the incorrect route, then it might be difficult to trust him with a heavy workload of routes in which he is the domestique for another playmaker to get the ball.
Conversely, if the Chiefs have no more playmakers for Kelce to free anyway and have to count on him, at age 36, to be the primary playmaker, we have also seen the difficulty in placing much faith in that outcome over the course of a long season.
Again, it should never bring anyone joy to point out that one of the greats seems to be exhibiting moments in which he is not quite what he was before. But as the Chiefs tiptoe deeper into this unfamiliar darkness, the team must decide what it can reasonably expect out of a player who is responsible for raising the bar to unfathomable, unfairly high expectations to begin with.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Chiefs Must Be Realistic About What They Can Get From Travis Kelce.