The Chiefs didn’t make the playoffs in 2025, but the release of the schedule for the 2026 season showed that the NFL still sees them as a marquee attraction.
Kansas City is scheduled for six primetime games and two of them come in the first two weeks of the season. They’ll be home against the Broncos on Monday night in Week 1 and back at Arrowhead Stadium to face the Colts on Sunday night in Week 2.
The scheduling suggests that the league believes Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes will be playing after recovering from last season’s torn ACL, but their head coach Andy Reid said on NFL Network Thursday that the team did not speak to the league about Mahomes’s health as part of the scheduling process. Reid did give another positive update on how things are going, however.
“He’s doing great right now and that’s kinda how you gotta go about this,” Reid said. “People go ‘well, he’s ahead of schedule.’ Who made the schedule? Everybody’s different, let’s just take it day by day. Nobody is spending more time than he is rehabbing, he spends seven hours here going through it. He hasn’t missed a day and he wants more, all the things that are Patrick Mahomes. Let’s see where we are at as we go forward as we get a little bit closer to the game.”
Broncos quarterback Bo Nix is coming off of a broken ankle and Reid joked that the league might have scheduled that as the opener as “motivation” for the two quarterbacks as they rehab, but said the scheduled won’t determine any of the team’s plans.
“He’s making progress, but you don’t know,” Reid said. “That’s the reality of it. You’re not going to put the player in a position where he can’t tend to himself on the football field.”
The league will continue to pay close attention to that progress in hopes of welcoming Mahomes back to the field on a grand stage.
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