3 Former Chiefs Who Will Fail Miserably With Their New Teams After Free Agency

3. Tommy Townsend (Houston Texans)

Getting $3 million per year with the Houston Texans puts Tommy Townsend within $700k of being the highest paid punter in football. But it's honestly hard to see how he's going to live up to that.

Townsend ranked only No. 18 among all punters in yards per attempt in 2023. Punters on winning teams aren't always getting to boom it out of their own end though, so you can't really hold that against him. Surely his job was to just be accurate and pin opponents deep, right?

Well pinning opponents inside their 20 on 33.8% of his punts ranked just 27th in the NFL. His punts were returned at one of the league's lowest rates, but that's largely because the KC special teams was regularly downing them for him and holding opponents to under 10 yards per return when they did field the kicks.

But now he moves from a Chiefs team that had PFF's fourth best special teams grade (despite his mediocre personal grade of 65.7) to a Texans team that ranked 14th. He won't have the support of a good coverage team, and even with Houston's impressive offense he'll likely need to kick for distance a lore more than he did in KC.

You've gotta respect the guy for cashing in while he's still in his prime (and still playing with a contender), but Townsend's about to find out just how good he had it with the Chiefs.

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