The Kansas City Chiefs now know who their first opponent will be in Week 1, and it'll be a big game.
The NFL is leaking schedule details in advance of a full release, and the Kansas City Chiefs learned that they’ll get a formidable challenge right out of the gate. They'll meet the Denver Broncos in the first Monday night game of the season in Week 1, according to a report from Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk along with multiple other outlets.
It’s not hard to see why the league made this selection. This was going to be a marquee game whenever it happened, so why not feature it right away given all the headlines it will undoubtedly generate?
There will also be plenty of juicy storylines, with the two biggest ones revolving around the quarterbacks. Both Bo Nix and Patrick Mahomes will be coming off serious injuries, and their respective recovery timelines will be an integral part of what happens in this one.
Mahomes, of course, is coming off a serious ACL/LCL tear, but he’s pushing hard to return to the field. He’s said numerous times that he wants to play in Week 1, and the Chiefs have offered an optimistic but tempered take on this by saying that he’s ahead of schedule.
The same applies to Nix, but his situation is much murkier. The quarterback broke his ankle against the Buffalo Bills in the divisional round of the playoffs, and coach Sean Payton created a controversy by saying Nix was “predisposed” to the injury. The Broncos have been walking back his comments and changing Nix’s timeline to return to the field ever since, so we still don’t know how that’s going to play out.
We do know the Chiefs will be a very different team from the one that wound up 6-11 and well out of the playoffs last season. They’ve revamped their defense and added running back Kenneth Walker III in free agency, so the thinking is that their offense will be more conservative at the start of the season.
But that’s guess work at this point, and the NFL is taking a big risk with this scheduling move. This game is going to lose a lot of its shine if either quarterback isn’t on the field, and there’s no way to know if that’s going to happen until well into the summer.
The Chiefs got beat twice by the Broncos last season, and the second game ended up being mostly meaningless with Kansas City well out of the running. The site hasn’t been announced yet, but this game is a headline-generator, and that’s a big part of what the NFL is about when it comes to releasing its schedule.