The Kansas City Chiefs made a couple of splashy offensive moves yesterday as the legal tampering window of free agency opened, but they also suffered some significant losses in the secondary.
Indeed, you can now make the argument that the Chiefs barely have a secondary after trading cornerback Trent McDuffie to the Rams, watching their other cornerback, Jaylen Watson, land with the same team, and losing Bryan Cook to the Cincinnati Bengals.
Cook’s deal was for three years, $40 million, according to Paul Dehner Jr. of The Athletic via reports by Tom Pelissero of the NFL Network and ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler. Cook was ranked third in most positional rankings for safeties, and The Athletic had him ranked No. 37 in its list of overall free agents.
This is a bigger loss than most people realize for the Chiefs, and it’s been overshadowed to a large extent by the signing of running back Kenneth Walker III, the re-signing of tight end Travis Kelce and the McDuffie trade. The thinking going into free agency was that the Chiefs might pay one of the secondary group consisting of Cook, Watson and McDuffie, but now they’re all gone.
For Cook, this is one of those “going home” signings. He played collegiately at the University of Cincinnati and is from the Cincinnati area, having played his high school football at Mt. Healthy High School, according to Dehner.
The safety earned a reputation for all-around excellence during his time with the Chiefs. He was a key part of two Super Bowl teams, and he was comfortable playing deep or in the box. He also missed just 11 tackles during the last two seasons, Dehner added, and that gave him a rank of seventh-best in the league in missed tackle rate among safeties.
He’ll step in immediately and play a big role with the Bengals. Cincinnati’s defense was awful last year, and missed tackles in the secondary were a big problem. Cook should help remedy that instantly, and he should also bring cohesion to a secondary that often looked lost, with missed assignments happening all over the field.
The Chiefs were prepared to let Cook go, but it is surprising that there will now be near-total turnover in the secondary as a whole. Kansas City has a couple of depth players who stepped in at the end of their lost season and played well, but it would be surprising if the Chiefs didn’t make at least one significant move to bolster the secondary, either in the draft or free agency.