The Chiefs have reportedly signed JuJu Smith-Schuster to a one-year, $10.75 million contract. And all is right with the world. The Chiefs have also replaced Tyreek Hill with Marquez Valdes-Scantling, so um, not so much.
When the news broke yesterday, I was 2,000 words into a Smith-Schuster piece that waxed philosophic about a 48-year stretch where the Chiefs were 4-16 in the playoffs, including seven losses at home. That heartbreak was merely prelude to the Patrick Mahomes era and victories that were even sweeter drenched in the memory of those defeats.
Somewhere in the winding labyrinth, at least a sentence worth of those 2,000 words suggested Smith-Schuster could be the final piece of a puzzle that would make Kansas City the greatest juggernaut in NFL history.
That, of course, became a soggy-napkin scribble of alt history fanfic. Tyreek Hill is gone.
But was I broken, demoralized, saddened to my core as I was when the Chiefs passed on Jonathan Taylor in the 2020 NFL draft? No. In a special live edition of Stealing Bananas, Ben let me claim that the Hill trade made KC better.
So this is now a different article, but if anything, JuJu Smith-Schuster is all the more relevant.
