Kansas City Chiefs: Whatever happened to Dorian O’Daniel?
The Kansas City Chiefs selected Dorian O’Daniel in the third round (100th overall pick) in the 2018 NFL Draft. A once promising prospect, O’Daniel has vanished off the face of the Earth in 2019.
Third round draft picks are usually thought pretty highly of and tend to compete for starting jobs at some point early on in their career. That has not been the case for Dorian O’Daniel, who is in year two with the Kansas City Chiefs and has not lived up to the hype whatsoever.
O’Daniel, who played safety and linebacker at Clemson, focused on the linebacker spot for the Chiefs, but has had a hard time finding the field. He’s yet to start a game this season and has appeared in nine of the team’s 11 games so far, contributing only on special teams.
In fact, according to his profile on Pro Football Reference, O’Daniel hasn’t seen a single defensive snap in 2019. For a third round pick just a year ago, that’s bad, and clearly not a high quality draft pick by Brett Veach in what was his first draft as the acting general manager of the Chiefs.
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Things didn’t look promising for O’Daniel this year when in preseason he was struggling to find playing time. In the game against the Bengals, O’Daniel was out there with the fourth stringers. That wasn’t exactly a confidence booster and really brought to light how little the organization thought of him.
With how much the Chiefs defense has struggled at times this season, O’Daniel not finding the field is pretty telling. He’s only 25 years old, but it certainly feels like he won’t be in a Chiefs uniform beyond this season.
Perhaps Dorian O’Daniel goes on to have a nice career somewhere else with another team, but it’s pretty clear that it’s not meant to be for him in Kansas City. He had a nice game against the Cincinnati Bengals last year, but since then, it’s been tough to really point out anything that the Clemson product has done in his two years as a pro player.
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It seems like a waste whenever a third round pick doesn’t pan out, but it happens. Maybe there’s still time for O’Daniel to turn things around, but more than likely, this is just one of those bad draft picks that we’ll look back on years from now and joke about.