On Sunday, Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid opened 2025’s training camp with a press conference in front of the team dorm at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph.
The club will hold athletic testing and its opening team meeting on Monday, followed by the first workout on Tuesday. That is when the coaching staff can begin evaluating the battle at left tackle, the marquee matchup of this season’s camp.
Kansas City signed former San Francisco 49ers backup Jaylon Moore in free agency, then selected Ohio State rookie Josh Simmons with the No. 32 overall pick in the first round.
It seemed the initial plan was to rotate Moore and Simmons at left tackle, but on Sunday, Reid revealed a wrinkle. Starting right tackle Jawaan Taylor is one of three Chiefs who will open camp on the physically-unable-to-perform (PUP) list.
“Jawaan is out for the beginning of it, so we’ll just flip those two guys, and they’ll work in there,” said Reid. “We’ll go from there. So yeah, but Andy [Heck] rotates all those guys anyway.”
Later in the presser, Reid hinted Taylor’s stay on the PUP list would be brief, after which there would be a more traditional rotation at left tackle between Moore and Simmons as Taylor takes back his place as the starting right tackle.
Reid outlined the critical separators in determining who will eventually win the starting left tackle position.
“You’re going to look for the best guy, to start with, that can fill in that spot and that we can have a little consistency there,” he said. “We didn’t have that last year, and so let’s work at it and see what we come up with. We’ve got some good candidates for it, and we’ll just see where it goes.”
Coming off a torn patellar tendon that he suffered while playing for Ohio State in mid-October, Simmons surprised Chiefs coaches by being able to do all that was asked of him by the end of organized team activities (OTAs). After minicamp, Reid confirmed Simmons would be a full go for training camp, but his work did not end there.
“He stayed up here this whole break,” said Reid of Simmons. “He’s been here, working his tail off… in the way he finished Phase 3. But it looks like he’s ready to go, and we’ll keep an eye on him and see where he’s at. But his condition — he was good when he was out there — and he seems to be a worker, so we’ll just have to see. He’s never been through one of these, so we gotta see how it goes.”
Pressed for a timeline, Reid suggested that he hoped to name a starter by the end of the team’s time in St. Joseph in mid-August.
“I think by the time you get out of this thing, you’d like to have an idea who that is, right? You want to have a feel on it. So we evaluate these guys — every player — for whether it’s a light practice or a hard practice, they’re evaluated and graded and so on. So, we’ll see how it all sorts out.”
