Kansas City will open its training camp in St. Joseph on Monday, July 21.
Speaking on Wednesday, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes expressed some frustration with the increasingly shorter break between the NFL offseason program and training camp.
“I don’t know how it works,” he told reporters. “It just seems like [the summer break] is getting shorter and shorter every single year. But that’s part of the process.”
On Thursday, however, we learned that head coach Andy Reid is joining a new trend: eliminating an extra week of training camp that included three practices for rookies and quarterbacks, giving players and coaches another week to recharge.
This year, all players may begin reporting to training camp at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph on Sunday, July 20 — but as Reid put it after the last session of the offseason program on Thursday morning, “things don’t get started officially until the 21st.”
About half of the NFL’s teams are shifting to this simpler training camp schedule.
Mahomes, for one, will appreciate the month-long break.
“I’ll spend as much time [as I can] with my family,” he predicted, “kind of stay in shape as best as possible and be ready to go whenever we step on that football field in St. Joe.”
For Reid, the move makes perfect sense — particularly this year.
“We don’t have a ton of guys that we could bring there,” he explained, “so I didn’t feel like that was a valuable time. We got the rookies here with extra time, so we took advantage of that — [and] we’ve done that throughout the offseason program. So I thought we got accomplished what we needed to.”
So mark your calendar for Monday, July 21. We’ll have the full training camp schedule soon.