The Kansas City Chiefs enter a pivotal offseason with several crucial roster decisions awaiting general manager Brett Veach. Some of them felt obvious from the jump. The Chiefs have some big contracts on the books for aging players who, at times, have not played up to the standard that their price tags dictate. Mike Danna was the first domino to fall, and many have presumed that names like Drue Tranquill and Jawaan Taylor may follow suit.
Cutting Taylor feels like a move that Chiefs fans have practically earned. After a season in which the team finished 6–11, finding nearly every possible way to light themselves on fire in games that could have gone either way, wouldn’t it be fitting for the team to borderline ceremoniously let go of the Sultan of Self-Sabotage? Taylor has led the league in penalties since he joined the Chiefs by a wide margin and has been the source of more requests to be fired into the sun on Twitter than any other Chiefs player in that timeframe.
Why cutting Jawaan Taylor felt inevitable
I began to wonder about this earlier in the weekend: why have the Chiefs not made a move on Taylor yet? Twenty million dollars in cap savings in a year in which the team needs to make several moves in free agency to shore up the roster in an attempt to get back to the playoffs in 2026 seems almost non-negotiable from a financial standpoint. Well, Veach complicated things a little further with his comments at the 2026 NFL Scouting Combine:
“With guys like Jawaan and Drue Tranquill, someone asked me about earlier, these guys started for us, and they played a lot of football for us. And again, our cap situation, I don’t know if we’re $6 or $7 (million) over, but I think we have $60 million in convertible contracts, too.”
Brett Veach just changed the math
Wait, excuse me? Are we living in a world where Jawaan Taylor could be a Chief not just for another year, but where it would appear there is potential for multiple years of the same player who has wrecked numerous crunch-time drives over the course of the last three seasons?
I presumed that the Chiefs had been tight-lipped on the Taylor situation because there was a small chance that they had already literally fired him into the sun. With the team’s proximity to Whiteman Air Force Base and its proclivity for accommodating immensely gratifying aerial pregame showcases, they may have access to advanced aeronautics capabilities that could have gotten that task completed. It would appear, though, that the Chiefs have more pure intentions in their dealings with Taylor and are neither capable of nor interested in orchestrating a high-level cover-up, which is a relief.
There is something to be said for familiarity and bringing back a piece of two Super Bowl–winning offensive lines for the Chiefs. Taylor has done that, lest we forget. He has honestly been quite solid in pass protection when he elects to line up legally and not begin plays prior to the offense’s assigned start times. There are things that we all are good at on a conditional basis, but for the most part, those things are not our primary career ventures.
The salary cap is never what it seems
Contract gymnastics seem to be Veach’s thing, though. He has essentially used the massive 2020 Patrick Mahomes extension like a credit card over the course of the last four offseasons, restructuring the deal so many times that it feels like they will eventually owe him $400 million via Western Union. These things just prove my theory that the salary cap is a figment of our imagination, a hurdle or invisible force field that NFL GMs have to creatively bypass in order to spare their billionaire owners from paying a made-up tax to the multibillion-dollar conglomerate NFL in what all seems like a cash-filled wind booth where everyone gets rich.
Whether the Chiefs bring back Taylor or not, it appears that both scenarios end with Veach gaining some headway in the cap for this offseason. That is a plus. If he can find a way to save $20 million-plus against this year’s cap and keep a veteran who could benefit from Eric Bieniemy’s much more disciplined approach to offensive football, perhaps we could see some new beginnings from Taylor in 2026 and start to look fondly on his Chiefs tenure.
For now, we just have to sit and wait for the process to unfold. If we, as a fanbase, are going to beat our chests and state “In Veach We Trust” during the good times, we have to remember to allot that same benefit of the doubt during the down times as well. If he re-signs Taylor and stacks a few key free agents in the process, would anyone really be that mad in the long run?
