Nobody outside of Arrowhead wants to relive the 2025 Chiefs season, but the tape doesn't lie: this offense missed the playoffs at 6-11, Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL in Week 15, and somewhere in the wreckage was one of the worst play-action passing attacks in football. Andy Reid's offense ran play-action on 178 snaps, seventh-most in the NFL, and got almost nothing for it: 977 yards, 20th in the league, with nine sacks against just three touchdowns. Mahomes attempted only seven play-action throws of 20-plus yards all season and completed three of them. For an offense that used to live off the fake, that's a broken pillar.
The diagnosis, per Reid, is that defenses stopped biting. Mahomes operated out of shotgun on 80.6% of snaps last year, third-most in the league, which meant there was rarely an actual mesh point to sell. Reid put it bluntly: defenders are seeing something and not respecting the run fake. The fix for 2026 involves getting Mahomes under center more often and, per the coaching staff, making him hold the ball longer before pulling it to actually mirror a handoff instead of tipping the play immediately.
The bigger fix, though, has a name: Kenneth Walker III. Kansas City signed him away from Seattle this offseason on a three-year, $43.05 million deal, the richest free-agent contract for a running back in NFL history, and it's not hard to see why. Walker was the Super Bowl LX MVP, running through the Patriots for 135 yards and two catches in a 29-13 rout, capping a postseason where he racked up 309-plus rushing yards and four touchdowns across three games. He's the first running back to win Super Bowl MVP this century. That's the kind of resume that makes defensive coordinators respect a run fake again.
Mahomes himself sounds genuinely excited about what Walker adds beyond just tote-the-rock volume, pointing to his ability to catch, run and pass protect as a way to turn nothing into a 20-yard gain. Eric Bieniemy has echoed that, framing a credible run game as the thing that reopens the deep shots that dried up last year. If Kansas City actually gets defenses to respect first-and-10 again, the trickle-down hits everyone: Xavier Worthy gets cleaner vertical shots off play-action, Rashee Rice sees safeties creep closer to the box, and Travis Kelce benefits from linebackers who now have to actually read their keys instead of sitting in coverage the whole down.
For fantasy purposes, Walker is the name to know. He's going in the early second round of most 2026 drafts, and while some analysts think that's a touch rich given he capped out around 13 carries per game in Seattle and never cracked true bellcow volume, the situation change is real: less crowded backfield, a scheme that wants to establish him specifically to sell the fake, and a quarterback publicly hyping his role. His floor is a low-end RB2 just off early-down work; his ceiling depends entirely on whether Reid actually feeds him on passing downs, which has historically been a stingy allocation under this staff. Watch the preseason usage patterns closely before paying full retail.
Worthy and Rice are the sneakier beneficiaries here. Both were miscast last year in an offense that couldn't force safeties out of two-high shells, since defenses had zero fear of the run fake. If the under-center reps and Walker's presence actually move coverages, Worthy's field-stretching profile gets a lot juicier for fantasy, and Rice's catch-and-run window opens up against lighter boxes. Kelce, in his age-36 season, is more of a wait-and-see: better play-action should mean more room underneath, but volume is the real question at this point in his career.
There's a betting angle worth folding in too. Kansas City's 2026 win total is sitting at 10.5, with Super Bowl odds around plus-1600 and Mahomes carrying plus-1000 MVP odds on the comeback-from-ACL narrative. None of that market moves unless the offense actually looks different early. If the play-action numbers spike in Weeks 1-3 and Walker is playing on passing downs instead of just early-down duty, that's the signal both fantasy managers and bettors should be watching for before fully buying back into this offense.
Bottom line: this was a real, fixable problem, not just bad luck. Kansas City identified exactly what went wrong and spent real money and scheme changes to fix it. Whether it works depends on execution details that only preseason reps and Week 1 tape can answer, but the intent is clear, and fantasy drafters should treat Walker's ADP and Worthy's WR2 profile as directly tied to whether this actually clicks.