Put your feet on Andy Reid’s desk in October when you have zero snaps on the 2026 ledger, and you will find out very quickly who runs Kansas City. On Wednesday, October 21, second-year left tackle Josh Simmons sat in an offensive meeting with his feet propped up, pushed back when his head coach told him to put them down, and disrupted the room until Patrick Mahomes himself stepped in and told the 23-year-old to get out and go see the trainers. By Thursday, Simmons was on injured reserve with a herniated disc. By Sunday, the Chiefs were getting embarrassed 20-3 in Seattle for their first loss of the year.
Now comes the hammer. On Tuesday’s episode of ESPN’s “Big Day with Peter Schrager,” NFL insider Ian Rapoport went on the air and put Simmons’ entire Kansas City tenure on life support. “There are a lot of questions about Josh Simmons, who is as talented a left tackle as you could possibly get,” Rapoport said. “He is a stud as a player. I don’t know if he plays for the Chiefs again. I don’t know when he plays for the Chiefs again. There’s nothing more important than protecting Patrick Mahomes. You have to believe in the person doing it, and until that happens, I don’t know that he’s out there.”
Read that quote twice, because Ian Rapoport does not float a trial balloon of that magnitude unless someone with a ring on his finger handed him the helium. In my view, when your franchise quarterback has to act as the bouncer in a Wednesday install meeting, the locker room verdict is already in.
Availability Is the Only Currency That Matters at Left Tackle
Look at the complete dossier on the 32nd overall pick from the 2025 draft out of Ohio State. In 22 possible regular-season games since general manager Brett Veach handed him a four-year, $14.68 million rookie contract in May 2025, Simmons has played in eight. Last season, he missed Weeks 6 through 9 for personal and family reasons, then dislocated and fractured his wrist on Thanksgiving against Dallas and went down for the year. This summer in St. Joseph, calf discomfort in mid-August turned out to be a bulging disc in his lower back, keeping him off the field for the first seven weeks of 2026.
Reid and vice president of sports medicine Rick Burkholder are dutifully maintaining the public company line that Thursday’s IR move was purely medical, a mutual decision by Simmons, his agent, Veach, and the staff after his rehab plateaued following a return to limited practice around October 14. Things happen. That’s no reason he’s been put on IR. He’s got a bad back. He’s got to get that worked out. But that’s the main thing. I’ll leave it at that.”
Reid can leave it wherever he wants for the cameras, because the timeline convicts Simmons anyway. I look at how Rapoport described the Wednesday confrontation on ESPN, per Heavy.com: “It involved having his feet up on the desk. He said he needed to because of his back. He’s going through rehab, and they said, ‘Well, just get out of here and go rehab.’ He did not handle it well. He went and apologized after. Then he was placed on injured reserve.” An apology later that same day does not erase the breach of trust that happened in that meeting room.
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You cannot play left tackle in Andy Reid’s offense with a bad back and a worse sense of the room. At 6-foot-5 and 310 pounds, a blindside protector has to anchor in deep pass sets, absorb bull rushes through his lower lumbar spine, and hinge his hips to mirror speed rushers around the arc without chip help on every third down. Instead, Kansas City has been surviving with undrafted rookie Kahlil Benson, who allowed 12 pressures across his first five games to rank 30th among 75 qualified tackles with at least 100 snaps, per CBS Sports and PFF… right up until Seattle’s pass rush suffocated the offense and held the Chiefs to three points.
Simmons’ camp and the medical staff can point out that a herniated disc makes sitting upright in a meeting chair agonizing, and I have no doubt the physical pain is real. That still does not excuse arguing with your head coach in front of the unit until the face of the league has to throw you out of the room. If your back hurts that badly on a Wednesday, you walk into the training table at 7:30 a.m. before the meeting starts; you do not turn an install session into a standoff.
My dad brain understands a 23-year-old kid getting frustrated when his body betrays him two years in a row, following a college patellar tendon repair in 2024, a broken wrist in 2025, and a bad disc in 2026. The problem for Josh Simmons is that Kansas City is chasing championship history, not running a youth mentorship program.
By rule, Simmons must sit for at least four games on injured reserve, making Week 11 against the Arizona Cardinals on November 22 his first mathematically possible return date. Watch what Brett Veach does with his offensive tackle depth chart over the next two weeks, because once Patrick Mahomes decides he cannot trust the man guarding his blind side, no medical clearance in November is going to get Josh Simmons his job back.
