Sleepers, Busts and Bold Predictions: The 2024 Kansas City Chiefs

Welcome to Sleepers, Busts and Bold Predictions for the 2024 fantasy football season. Our Chris Meaney and Daniel Kelley are going to go team-by-team around the league all summer. They’ll pick sleepers, busts and bold predictions for each team. Sometimes they’ll agree! Sometimes they will go completely opposite one another! And that’s fine, because they’ll defend their positions, and you can decide for yourself who to side with. Up today: The Kansas City Chiefs.

Below, they tackle the team, starting with their picks in “The Answers,” then expanding on their picks in “The Explanation.”

2024 Sleepers, Busts & Bold Predictions: Kansas City Chiefs

The Answers

Favorite Sleeper

Meaney: Marquise Brown
Kelley: Rashee Rice

Biggest Bust

Meaney: Xavier Worthy
Kelley: Patrick Mahomes

Bold Prediction

Meaney: Isiah Pacheco Scores 17 Touchdowns
Kelley: The Chiefs’ RB2 Is Not Currently on the Roster

The Explanations

Sleepers

Meaney: Marquise Brown

A shout out to Deneric Prince, who I believe is a deep sleeper and someone I have shares of in larger best ball formats. Prince is third on the depth chart, but he’ll pass Clyde Edwards-Helaire and it may happen as early as the first month of the season. However, an injury would need to happen to Isiah Pacheco for Prince to get consistent touches. With that said, I’ll lean with Marquise Brown as my sleeper in Kansas City. At WR32, pick 53.6 on average, the price seems fair. He’s a great WR3 should you land him in drafts, but I believe there’s a world where Brown finishes closer to a WR1. Patrick Mahomes didn’t have a deep threat in his offense last season, which is why we saw plenty of screens. No team had more drops than the Chiefs last season, which is part of the reason Mahomes finished as QB14 in points per game. Brown brings speed and explosiveness to Andy Reid’s offense. Health is a concern, but Hollywood could easily top his career-best 1,008-yard season from 2021 with the Baltimore Ravens. We’ve seen Hollywood in a WR1 role before in Arizona, and he put up WR1 numbers. 

Kelley: Rashee Rice

The NFL has never once been in a hurry to levy discipline. Alvin Kamara’s suspension to start the 2023 season was because of an incident in February 2022, for example. That makes sense, because the league likes to wait for the legal process to play itself out, and we know the American court system isn’t known for its rapidity. So we don’t have to condone Rashee Rice’s offseason extracurriculars to know it creates an opportunity for fantasy. Because after finishing as the PPR WR27 as a rookie in a season where he didn’t get his first start until Week 7 or have his first 100-yard or 8-plus-target game until Week 12, right now you can get Rice as the WR37 in ADP, five WR slots below new teammate Marquise Brown and one ahead of rookie Xavier Worthy. Worthy and Brown have skill sets with plenty of overlap, while Rice’s is unique in Kansas City. The longer we go without any suspension, the more likely it is pushed to 2025 altogether (if it even happens), and that would give us a shot at a top-20 (or so) receiver who is barely being drafted inside the top 40.

Busts

Meaney: Xavier Worthy

Honestly, I’m unsure of Rashee Rice’s status. It sounds like he could avoid a suspension until next season with his court date for the high-speed hit-and-run crash and marijuana possession set for Dec. 9. Keep in mind that Alvin Kamara’s off-the-field issues in early 2022 didn’t result in a suspension until 2023. If Rice goes the entire season without a suspension from the NFL, then he’s one of the better values at WR37. If that’s the case, Worthy’s WR38 price tag is one he may not live up to. I get it, he’s the fastest man ever at the Combine and he’s now linked to Mahomes and Reid. However, this reminds me a lot of when the Chiefs took CEH and everyone said he was the next Brian Westbrook. It takes time for some of these rookie wideouts, and he’s lacking the size and strength to return value on his fifth-round price tag. It took Tyreek Hill three years to become the Tyreek Hill we see on the field now. At best, Worthy is the fourth option in the passing game.

Kelley: Patrick Mahomes

Taking Patrick Mahomes ahead of Lamar Jackson in 2024 isn’t quite an indefensible position, because Mahomes does come with a very secure floor. But it’s close. If you’re drafting a quarterback as high in drafts as you’d have to to get one of these guys, you need to shoot for the ceiling of ceilings, and while Mahomes has displayed that ceiling, he’s not really doing it anymore. That’s no shade — he’s the best quarterback we’ve ever seen and we’re lucky to exist at the same time as what he’s doing. But the things that make a quarterback really go nuts for fantasy aren’t really what Mahomes does at this point in his career. For example, he was QB8 last year with 0 rushing touchdowns, his first season as a starter without a rushing score. And lest you think it’s an aberration, Mahomes’ red-zone rushing yardage plummeted last year:

Mahomes suffered an ankle injury late in the 2022 season that nearly dashed the Chiefs’ Super Bowl hopes, and the adjustment appears to clearly be “OK, don’t get him in that situation again.” There’s no quarterback after Josh Allen I would feel safer putting as a top-10 finisher than Mahomes, but taking him at QB3, even QB5, is a bet I don’t want to make.

Bold Predictions

Meaney: Isiah Pacheco Scores 17 Touchdowns

Pacheco touched career highs across the board last season, including rushing touchdowns (7) and receiving touchdowns (2). He was just a guy who took over the backfield in the second half of his rookie season in 2022. Last year he was the guy in the Chiefs’ backfield, as he racked up 249 touches in 14 games. He’s more familiar with the offense as he heads into year three and this offense will be better with some of the additions they made in the offseason. Pacheco is a very underrated pass catcher so some of his touchdowns may come through the air, as he’s hauled in 57 of the 63 balls thrown his way. 

Kelley: The Chiefs’ RB2 Is Not Currently on the Roster

This might be boring! Isiah Pacheco is all but assured to be the Chiefs’ lead running back by a mile in 2024, and while he’s relatively unlikely to threaten for RB1 overall status in fantasy, he’s an easy top-20 running back with top-10 upside. But behind him are bust Clyde Edwards-Helaire, rugby player Louis Rees-Zammit, UDFAs Emani Bailey and Carson Steele, never-made-it Deneric Prince and Keaontay Ingram and somehow now Kadarius Toney. Pacheco will lead the Chiefs’ backfield in fantasy scoring in 2024, but sometime between now and the start of the season, the team will sign someone (Jerick McKinnon again? Someone after cutdown day?), and that player will (a) be the RB2 in Kansas City and (b) become one of the highest-upside handcuffs in fantasy football.