From Tuesday night through Wednesday morning, NFL teams will be burning the midnight oil, evaluating more than 1,000 players who were cut from league rosters.
Some — like just-released Chiefs Mike Pennel and Robert Tonyan — are free agents who can be signed right away. Others — such as Kansas City’s just-waived Chris Oladokun and Esa Pole — can be claimed by other teams on waivers.
If a claim is successful — that is, if there is not a competing claim from a team earlier in the waiver order — the team assumes the player’s existing contract. Claimed players must be added to the new team’s 53-man active roster — meaning that a team must be prepared to cut someone else to make room for the new player.
The Chiefs — as losers of Super Bowl LIX — are 31st in the waiver order.
Waiver claims can be submitted until 11 a.m. Arrowhead Time on Wednesday. Players who go unclaimed by that time “clear” waivers. They become free agents who can be signed to any team’s active roster or practice squad.
Reserve/Injured return eligibility
Each team will have until 3 p.m. Arrowhead Time on Wednesday to name players currently on its Reserve/Injured list who will be eligible for designations to return.
Each team may do this for only two players — and for each one named as eligible, the number of return designations the team may make in the season (eight for most, but 10 for teams that make it to the postseason) is reduced by one — even if that player is ever designated for return.
So if teams have more than two players they might want to return from IR, they will have to be on the 53-man roster through Wednesday before they are placed on that list. This way, they will automatically be eligible for return designations.
This may be why the Chiefs released veterans like Pennel and Tonyan — so they could put injured players like Jalen Royals or Omarr Norman-Lott on Reserve/Injured for the first four games of the season, replacing them with the veteran players. Teams and veterans sometimes have an understanding: the player will be re-signed immediately after the injured player goes on IR.
