As the league’s annual summer slump continues, ESPN to publish An article focusing on seven men who have played exactly one game in the NFL. Reading it, I wondered how many players appeared in one game for the Kansas City Chiefs.
When I looked at the menu, four caught my eye.
Guard Trey Stallings
The Chiefs’ sixth-round pick in 2006, the 6-foot-4, 317-pound Mississippi product was active for four games in Kansas City at the end of the 2007 season. He played as a backup in the Week 17 game against New York Jetsand collected a false start penalty as the Chiefs finished the season 4-12 with a 13-10 overtime loss.
Stallings has spent time with Baltimore Crows in the next two seasons but did not appear in another NFL game. He then began a career in sports management, with stops including serving as Director of Player Engagement at the National Football League Tennessee Titans, director of player development at the University of Illinois and as assistant executive director of the NCAA. In 2020, he was named Conference USA Associate Commissioner.
Quarterback Mike Elkins
When people talk about the Chiefs’ 34 years with first-round draft picks quarterback Todd Blaledge in 1983 and Patrick Mahomes in 2017, I always like to bring up Elkins. While he was selected in the second round in 1989, he was the 32nd pick overall – so if he had been selected in a more recent season, he would have been selected in the first round as well.
Unfortunately, the former Wake Forest The quarterback fell short of his draft form. In Week 12 of his rookie season, Kansas City was officiating a 34-0 rout of the Houston Oilers when Elkins was told to put his clipboard on and tackle Steve DeBerg. He threw two passes. One was a five-yard finish. the other was intercepted.
While Elkins spent time with both the Oilers and Cleveland Browns (and the Sacramento Surge of the World League of American Football), that was the only game Elkins played in the NFL. Today, he is Regional Sales Director for Biotronik, a company specializing in medical electronics.
In place of kicker Justin Medlock
When 2007 NFL Draft Upon his arrival, the Chiefs franchise has spent nearly half of its history with either Jan Steenrod or Nick Lowry as the team’s assistant. It would be fair to say that fans were expecting excellence in the position – but except for the times when the club brought in big time veterans like Pete Stojanovic or Morten Anderson, the team wasn’t usually going to get that far.
Lawrence Tynes was as close to being a young player the team could count on—but in three seasons, he never ranked higher than 16th in field goal accuracy. So Tynes was destined to New York Giants – where he will win two power rings over the next six seasons—while Kansas City general manager Carl Peterson used a fifth-round draft pick to get Medlock out of University of California.
But in the first week of 2007, Medlock went 1-for-2 in his only match with the Chiefs: a 20-3 loss to Houston Tx. Peterson pulled the plug, installing third-year player Dave Rayner as a replacement for the next 10 games — and then finished the season with 43-year-old John Carney.
Unlike Stallings and Elkins, however, Medlock eventually played for another NFL team. In 2012 , Carolina Panthers He became the team’s fifth signing but only the second to put him on the field. He appeared in 10 games that season but was released in November after missing field goals in three straight games. Those were the last NFL games he ever played.
But Medlock kept his dream alive. After a stint with the Oakland Raiders in 2013, he returned to the Canadian Football League (where he was an important contributor to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2011), eventually helping the Winnipeg Blue Bombers win the Gray Cup in 2019. He is a place and punter. Now 39, he is a free agent.
Quarterback Tyler Bray
One day you’ll be able to win a strip bet by knowing that Bray was the first backup quarterback to take over for Mahomes in an NFL game. Most people would have thought it was Chad Henne (who became a backup for Kansas City in 2018), forgetting that Bray came on Mahomes during the final game of the 2017 season against the UCLA. Denver Broncos.
First signed as an undrafted free agent out of Tennessee in 2013, Bray spent five seasons associated with the Chiefs. One of those was spent on injured reserve. And he spent another on the reserve list for non-football injuries. In both 2016 and 2017, the team has repeatedly activated (and deactivated) him from the roster. The popular notion was that coach Andy Reid strongly believed Bray could be a contributor. The team has definitely gone through a lot of trouble keeping their rights to him.
So in that Broncos game — after Kansas City’s Terrence Mitchell intercepted a pass that he returned for 40 yards midway through the fourth quarter — Reed decided a 24-10 lead was big enough to give him. last Chiefs quarterback first time playing in the NFL.
However, Bray fumbled his first snap for the first time – and the Broncos returned it 38 yards for a touchdown. On the next drive, Kansas City came away with a three-and-out. Bray’s only pass fell incomplete. Denver then engineered an eight-play, 2:23 touchdown drive to tie the game at 24 with 2:53 left—then Mahomes converted on the first game-winning drive of his career, setting up Harrison Butker for a 30-yard field goal with four seconds remaining.
Bray followed Matt Nagy to the shores of Lake Michigan when he became the Chiefs’ quarterbacks coach Chicago Bears In 2018. Nagy also kept Bray for a while (Naji – not Reid – may have been the coach he most admired). But in his second (and final) NFL game in Week 10 of 2020, Bray appeared on five snaps, completing one pass for 18 yards on five attempts as the Bears fell to Minnesota Vikings 19-13.
During his nine-year NFL career (he spent two games on San Francisco 49erscoaching staff in 2021), Bray appeared in two games, completed one pass on six attempts for 18 yards—and lost a fumble. For this, Spottrack estimates that he earned $4.4 million.
Like Medlock, the 31-year-old Bray is a free agent.