The Kansas City Chiefs added quarterback Justin Fields this offseason, which seems to imply something about the Patrick Mahomes injury situation: that Mahomes will probably miss at least a few weeks early in the season while recovering from the knee injury that ended his 2025 season.
Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The Kansas City Chiefs will aim to maximize Justin Fields’ impact while Patrick Mahomes recovers from a knee injury.
- Andy Reid must leverage Fields’ strengths through a strategic focus on the run game and designed quarterback runs.
- A balanced approach using short passes to reliable targets will be crucial for Fields’ success in the Chiefs’ offense.
Fields is a very imperfect player, but as a short-term option to keep the team from losing too much while waiting on Mahomes to return, KC could do much, much worse. Andy Reid just has to make sure he puts Fields in the best position possible to succeed. Here are three ways he can do that.
Lean on the run game with Kenneth Walker
First and foremost, if the Chiefs want to succeed with Fields under center, the team needs to rely heavily on its marquee offseason addition, Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker.
The run game was a disaster for the Chiefs in 2025, as Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt both struggled to create positive plays. It seemed like every rushing attempt was destined to end before it even began. Adding Walker goes a long way toward changing that.
2025 | Yards Per Carry |
|---|---|
Kenneth Walker | 4.6 |
Isiah Pacheco | 3.9 |
Kareem Hunt | 3.7 |
I'm a firm believer that 2026 will see Walker unleashed in a way we haven't seen before, as he spent his entire Seahawks tenure splitting snaps. Freed to be the lead back, Walker has a chance to finish as one of the NFL's top rushers, and he'll really open up the playbook for Reid once Mahomes is back.
Until then, Walker might end up being ridden a bit too much, but that's still the best path toward winning football games with Fields under center.
Let Fields run the football
Fields isn't a super-accurate passer but he is very fast, so it seems obvious that adding designed quarterback runs into the playbook would be a smart decision. It's something that you hoped to avoid with Mahomes under center because the risk of injury was so high — every time he took off scrambling, my Chiefs fan wife would visibly grimace — but the calculus is much different now with Fields.
We're talking about a guy who led the NFL in yards per rushing attempt in 2022 and has finished with over five yards per carry in four of his five NFL seasons. His legs are a weapon; his arm isn't a liability in the same way it was back in Chicago, but you aren't winning football games on the back of Fields' arm.
Last season with the New York Jets, Fields led all quarterbacks in designed runs per game at 4.1, and adding in scrambles saw him finish with 7.9 carries per game, good for second at the position. And look, you might say "well, uhh, the Jets stunk with Fields, so why would the Chiefs use this same approach," which is a fair thing to say. The key difference is that in Kansas City, Reid will be the one designing these plays for Fields. In New York, it was Tanner Engstrand. There's a big difference there. I trust Reid to actually take advantage of the thing that Fields does really, really well.
Utilize the short passing game
Okay, but Fields has to throw the ball at some point, right? And this is where the Chiefs have to be careful, because it's where everything can fall apart.
Fields is a below-average NFL passer. Has he gotten better since his first couple of seasons in Chicago? Sure, but there was a long way to go up, so even that improvement still places him fairly far down the list of NFL passers.
Stat | 2025 Rank Among QBs |
|---|---|
True Completion Percentage | 26th |
Deep Ball Completion Percentage | 27th |
Clean Pocket Completion Percentage | 22nd |
Pressured Completion Percentage | 29th |
During his Bears tenure, Fields ranked in the top 11 in air yards per attempt in each season. He threw 30 interceptions over that time. Last year in New York, he dropped to 32nd in that stat and threw just one interception.
Kansas City doesn't need Fields to revert to being a turnover machine, so designing plays that let him get the ball out quickly and into the hands of players like Travis Kelce and Rashee Rice should be the focus. The team doesn't really have a reliable deep threat anyway, so there's no point in letting Fields sit back and wait for something to develop. If we get more than one deep attempt directed at Tyquan Thornton in a game, something is going wrong for the Chiefs offense.
And once again, you could say that this is a repeat of how Fields failed in New York, but I will once again respond that team context matters. The Chiefs have personnel that is better equiped to help Fields survive as a passer. Not that Kansas City has a good passing attack, but Kelce is a hugely important target, and I'm also working under the assumption that the team adds another receiver in the draft as well.