Robert Frost once said,
“Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.
There are only middles.“
This may be the “beginning” of another season but the Kansas City Chiefs are in the “middle” of making a drive for a championship which began three years ago when head coach Andy Reid and general manager John Dorsey moved here. It’s better to understand that, before entering into a discussion about the Chiefs 2016 training camp.
Appropriately, this training camp started out with a light rain… which turned to scattered clouds and a light wind in the mid 80s. It was so pleasant that you hardly thought about the fact that it has been over half a year since we last saw the men in red and gold darting about a football field.
The Chiefs took the field at 3:30PM and proceeded to go through drill situations… goal line… kickoffs… field goal setups… driving the ball downfield (2:00 drill, presumably).
On the opposite practice field small groups of players came over for 20 minute segments (which always ended with a loud horn) and practiced different skills like: QBs throwing corner fades into a trash can setup in the corner of the end zone… FG kicker Cairo Santos practicing kicks of length and apparently height (with the new kickoff rule in place). The QBs also threw tight and quick spirals into a soccer-type net with squares taped into it like a strike zone (only the square was taped much higher than a strike zone) with each QB taking a number of reps quickly being pitched the ball and they’d turn their feet quickly and let it fly.
Probably the biggest surprise of the day was watching Chris Conley return kickoffs. De’Anthony Thomas looked like he had a kickoff return that would have gone all the way (or at least past the 50 yard line) so, that was good to see. Competition in camp looks to be intense at most every position but FG kicker. However, it looks like the wide receivers are all trying to make a play ever play and that was good to see.
At the end of practice all players lined up at the 50 yard lined and stretched by taking long and slow steps towards the end zone. They then turned around and repeated that out to the 50 again. The whole team then repeated that process down and back.
I met a fan from Dallas, Pennsylvania (and BTW… he hates the Steelers… so he’s all right by me) who has been a fan since the Chiefs played the Dolphins in the longest game in NFL history on December 25th, 1971. He’s a photographer and we may end up seeing some of his photo-journalism work here on ArrowheadOne. One note of interest… he had already been to ArrowheadOne before I handed him a card with the web address on it. Small world.
Most all players lined the fenced areas and signed autographs following practice. The gate attendants said their were over 3,000 fans in attendance but a policeman and event planner who I spoke with thought it was closer to 4,000.
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I know I promised you the Live Streaming while at camp but… today, taking video and uploading it to my Twitter page… then downloading that here to ArrowheadOne at the end of the day… has worked out great. So well in fact that… I think many would be disappointed in the distance and chest high Live Feed I would be giving you… plus there would be no saved videos at the end of the day…. so… long story short… I’m going to repeat this process on Sunday morning/evening, unless I get major objections.