Chiefs Rumors: Chris Jones calls bluff, Orlando Brown replacement, Mahomes trusts Toney

Chiefs Rumors: Patrick Mahomes misplaces trust in Kadarius Toney

Despite the catastrophic drops by Kadarius Toney, Patrick Mahomes is media trained well enough to know his best path is to publicly defend his wide receiver.

"I have trust in KT," Mahomes told reporters after the game, per NFL.com. "He missed a lot of training camp. Obviously, he wanted to play and fought in rehab hard so he could play. Stuff is not always going to go your way. Obviously, he would have wanted to catch a few of those in the game, but I have trust that he is going to be the guy that I go to in those crucial moments and he's going to make the catch and win us some games like he did last year and get him more and more reps. I'm sure that those drops will disappear."

The problem for Toney and the Chiefs is those drops are par for the course for the receiver.

Jordan Dajani of CBS revealed as much with a damning stat that should have Mahomes wary of throwing Toney's way again: Toney's drop rate of 9.7 percent on 82 career targets is the highest in the NFL since 2021 among wide receivers with 75 or more targets.

And that was before Toney dropped another pass, raising his drop rate to 11 percent.

That's an unacceptable number that can't be excused by injury or training camp absence. It's a receiver's job to catch the passes that hit his hands. That primary skill shouldn't regress because of a knee problem.

The drops weren't a Week 1 problem. They're a Toney problem.