Kansas City Chiefs: Top five draft picks of the last decade

The NFL Draft is now only a couple of months away. After finishing 12-4, winning the AFC West, and playing for the AFC Championship, the Kansas City Chiefs will draft 29th.

Throughout the years, the Kansas City Chiefs have had rather varied success drafting players, especially quarterbacks. In 1983, with the seventh pick in the draft, the Chiefs selected Todd Blackledge out of Penn State. Still on the board that year were a couple of gunslingers you may have heard of: Miami quarterback Jim Kelly and Pittsburgh’s Dan Marino.

Blackledge lasted 46 games in the pros, throwing 29 touchdown passes and 38 interceptions… and the Chiefs wouldn’t draft another quarterback in the first round for 34 years.But more on that pick later, as he will undoubtedly show up again.

For the purposes of this article, I’m looking at the last decade worth of draft picks by the Chiefs to find their five best. I began with the team’s first selection in 2009, the third overall pick, defensive end Tyson Jackson, and ended with the team’s most recently selection, the son of former Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie, sixth-rounder Kahlil, a converted offensive lineman who didn’t play a down in 2018.

Overall, in the last ten drafts, the Chiefs selected 76 players. For this article, I went through each and every one of those players before settling upon 12 from which to choose the top five.

12. That’s it. That’s (does math) 15.7% of the players drafted.

But one of those dozen is a quarterback with a losing record in college who just became the first Chief to win the league’s MVP. When a team has a player of that caliber, even at this early of a stage in his career, that team will have chance after chance to compete in the playoffs.

To break it down a little bit, among the 12 considered:

• One was a sixth-round pick, one was a fifth-round pick, four were third-round picks, two were second-round picks, and four were first-round picks.
• Seven played offense and five played defense.
• Ten were selected in the top 100 picks of the draft.
• Five were drafted out of SEC schools.
• Seven were drafted out of Power 5 schools while three went to Group of 5 schools.
• One played at a school in Canada.
• As of the writing of this, 11 remain with the team.

Now, let’s get to it.