Kansas City Chiefs: Re-Drafting biggest misses of past decade

The Kansas City Chiefs have had their fair share of “misses” in the draft over the past decade. Who are some of those missed prospects and who else could KC have had?

This time of the year, it’s all about the NFL Draft, the best and most economical way for teams to build their teams, whether it’s in the search of a franchise quarterback or plugging holes to keep open a window of opportunity. It’s also a fun time to step back and take a look at past drafts and see where a team could have done better. Let’s do that with the Kansas City Chiefs.

Using the term “fun” is relative, of course, as for the men and women making these decisions in real time, it’s their livelihood on the line. But for the fan and/or writer looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it is fun.

Everybody wants to play the general manager–that’s why mock drafts are so popular these days as is making a free-agent wish-list for your favorite team, pining for the front office to swing a major deal that could really help.

There’s a term for all of this: fandom.

With all of that in mind, in this article, I’m going to dive into the past ten drafts of the Kansas City Chiefs. A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the Chiefs top draft picks of the past decade. Here, I’m not necessarily looking at their worst picks of the last decade, but looking at where they got it wrong and who they could have taken to get it right.

I’m setting some ground rules for this to keep this exercise a little grounded. If I’m re-drafting for a miss in the first-round, I’m going to look at who was taken in the next five draft picks. If it’s for any round after the first, I’ll extend that to ten picks later.

That means I won’t be saying that the Chiefs really screwed up in 2010 when they took defensive end Cameron Sheffield out of Maryland in the fifth round with pick 142 instead of selecting Central Michigan wide receiver Antonio Brown–because he wasn’t selected for another 53 picks. That’s the size of an entire NFL roster!

Besides, it turns out other missed opportunities in 2010 make that particular draft its own sort of hell for the Chiefs. But we’ll get to that at the end.

For the time being, let’s turn back the clock to 2009 when the Chiefs selected Tyson Jackson third overall out of LSU. While he didn’t have the most productive tenure in Kansas City, he wasn’t the team’s biggest miss that draft. Far from it, actually.