The Kansas City Chiefs welcomed back their best pass-catcher last week. Rashee Rice completed a six-game suspension after pleading guilty to two felony charges relating to his involvement in a 2024 multi-car crash in Dallas. In addition to the six-game absence to start this year, it’s worth remembering that Rice had not played in a football game in over a calendar year, as he was lost for the duration of the 2024 season early in Week 4 with a knee injury.
There’s a part of me that wishes we got to see the Chiefs operate in a “normal” game in Rice’s first action of this season. What we saw between them and the Raiders was absolutely not normal.
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As Nate Tice noted, Las Vegas ran 30 plays in Week 7 against the Chiefs, which was the fewest amount of plays an NFL offense has run in a game since at least 2002. That is absurd. It was perhaps only bested in the outrage department by the fact that both the Raiders and the Chiefs essentially decided to "sim to end" at one point in this game.
Not only did the Chiefs take their starters out of the game at the very end of the third quarter with a 31-0 lead but backup quarterback Gardner Minshew II took his first kneel of the game with 2:36 left on the clock.
So, yes, not a regular game whatsoever. We can’t fully know how Rice will be deployed over the course of the season. However, there are a few takeaways we can lean on.
As mentioned, the Chiefs' starters didn’t play over the course of the game. Even still, Rice wasn’t a full-time player in his first game back. In the first half, Rice only ran a route on 51.7% of Patrick Mahomes’ dropbacks. That was tied with JuJu Smith-Schuster for third behind Xavier Worthy (79.3%) and Travis Kelce (69%). Kansas City always rotates its pass-catchers to some degree but that’s not usual for Rice. He posted an 82% route participation in the first three weeks of last season, which led the team.
Despite not playing all the snaps, we got full confirmation that Rice remains the go-to guy in this passing game. When he was on the field, Mahomes relentlessly targeted the third-year receiver. Rice was selected on an obnoxious 53.3% of his 15 routes in the first half and 52.6% throughout the course of the game. Rice saw 10 targets go his way; no one else had more than four.
We can’t expect target per route rates north of 50% every week but given just how much he’s schemed into layup situations, he’ll be an easy player to funnel significant volume, as has been the case throughout his career.
Rice has always been a low air yards per target player in the NFL, averaging 4.8 and 5.2 in his first two seasons. He’s weaponized perfectly as a zone-beater and YAC menace in this offense. However, his meager 0.8 air yards per target mark from Week 7 was a bit extreme. His involvement at the goal-line is skewing that but the routes where he got the ball were all super shallow.
Even if the NextGen route charts don’t tell the full story — because it’s only highlighting routes where the player was targeted — I only charted two plays where he ran a route farther than 10 yards down the field in this game when I reviewed the tape for Reception Perception.
There’s no doubt it was good to see Rice earn a lion’s share of the targets, dominate against zone coverage underneath and look explosive with the ball in his hands; none of that is new. It’s encouraging to see that Rice looks exactly like his old self after coming back from the injury but to me, that is not a revelatory discovery.
The real possible breakthrough for Rice will come if he takes a step forward in other facets of the position.
Rice still has room to grow as a true one-on-one route winner against man coverage. He can improve as a quick separator against press coverage with a more varied release package off the line, rather than just relying on playing with power. He’s dominant on layup routes from the slot but he can get even better when running downfield routes from the perimeter.
We already know Rice can be a fantasy WR1 without any of those progress steps and just remaining the same player he’s always been in this offense. I already don’t think I can name 10 wide receivers I’d rather have than Rice in fantasy the rest of this season.
Should he make any steps forward in the areas I listed, then we’re talking about him being one of the real-deal best wide receivers in the sport. After Rice’s first season, I compared his rookie year Reception Perception data to that of Lions' now-superstar receiver, Amon-Ra St. Brown. St. Brown went on to make those leaps I laid out for Rice and now he’s a slam-dunk top-five fantasy receiver and Tier 1 real-life wideout. That’s the next step I’m looking to see out of Rice. We’ll need more than one game to say if it’s happened but if he takes those jumps, especially with Patrick Mahomes playing peak football right now, look out.
Even without any of those developments taking place, Rice’s presence back in the offense creates major conflict for the other pass-catchers in this offense. Again, I don’t want to overreact to this one weird game sample, but Travis Kelce was targeted on a season-low 10.3% of his routes in Week 7. Kelce and Rice work in the same areas of the field with the former at tight end and the latter at big slot. Since Rice is significantly more explosive with the ball in his hands right now, he’s going to get more looks. With Mahomes playing QB1-overall-level football right now and the state of the tight end position in fantasy, Kelce can still be a top-12 tight end option, but his ceiling and floor combo is lower now.
Despite leading the team in routes last week, Xavier Worthy may be in just as problematic a spot as Kelce. At the same time, Worthy’s role doesn’t and was never going to overlap with Rice, despite some of the narratives at the end of his rookie season and in the playoffs, as he’s more of a perimeter wideout who gets open most consistently downfield.
Worthy will get some quick-hitters on out-breakers against man coverage, like we saw in last season’s playoff run, but Rice is likely to lap him in usage close to the line of scrimmage. So, in order for him to hit big, it will have to come on some of those deeper routes. That’s naturally going to lead to more volatility no matter who the player is but the Mahomes-to-Worthy connection has also been hit-or-miss over the course of their short time together in the pros. The timing was off in Year 1 and Worthy isn’t a consistent threat against press because of his size.
Worthy can be excellent for the Chiefs in that role but there will be some boom and bust moments for fantasy. The right matchups will present themselves, including a game against the beatable Commanders’ secondary in Week 8, but Worthy now falls into the large bucket of volatile WR3s.
In general, we want to be exposed to this Chiefs offense. It looks like the best unit we’ve seen out of Kansas City since 2022. Mahomes is playing elite at quarterback and has the players to cash in on the throws. The rotation of players in the passing game and backfield can be frustrating but everyone has their roles and we know who the best players are, regardless.
However, what we know for sure, even in a weird one-game sample, is that this passing game once again flows through Rashee Rice.