The Kansas City Chiefs have three major questions on offense: will Patrick Mahomes be healthy, will Rashee Rice be healthy, and will Kenneth Walker stay healthy? Boy howdy, who are they, the 49ers? Let’s take a look at the 2026 Kansas City Chiefs’ fantasy football sleeper, undervalued, and overvalued players!
Sleeper: Emmett Johnson, Running Back (RB53, Pick 172 OVR)
Rookie Emmett Johnson is set to back up Walker, but I doubt he gets enough touches to matter unless Walker gets hurt. In case he does, here’s the talent profile from the rookie roundup: Emmett Johnson is a north-south runner who doesn’t have great contact balance and who has some questionable footwork on counter runs. He also struggles to maximize the point of attack on holes opened by his offensive line. That having been said, he has exceptional lateral agility, though he gets hampered in the open field by bad vision, below-average creativity, and zero home run speed. Johnson possesses elite agility, but he knows that, and he spams it right into defenders.
Johnson is an above-average pass catcher, as well. Though he doesn’t run a varied route tree, he is more than capable of adjusting to poorly thrown balls, and immediately turning upfield with them.
Brashard Smith also exists in this backfield, and people keep trying to spam him into the abolished Jerick McKinnon role. He’s a decent pass catcher, but he had fewer targets last season than Kenneth Walker averages, and the same people trying to spam Smith into the pass catcher role say that Kenneth Walker can’t catch passes.
Undervalued: Rashee Rice, Wide Receiver (WR11, Pick 26 OVR)
The Chiefs’ offense is built on a load-bearing amount of Rashee Rice BS (low aDOT targets working as a facsimile of a run game). Still, Rashee Rice had a cleanup procedure this offseason that was expected to keep him on the shelf for two months. Still, he immediately went to prison for 30 days for a probation violation, meaning that he didn’t get a chance to actually rehab his knee while in jail. This is the prevailing theory about Rashee Rice.
Except: breaking news. He was able to leave jail to get rehab work on his knee during his sentence, according to kansascity.com. So, guess what folks: there’s no reason to fade Rashee Rice.
Rice is a primo top-ten PPR wide receiver, with absolutely nothing standing between him and weekly top-five upside. He doesn’t do it traditionally; his average depth of target is just 4.3 yards downfield, which puts him below Tucker Kraft, who was low for a tight end. It ranked 97th last season, but that silly little bullshit is why Rashee Rice is great for fantasy football purposes. Rice first had double-digit targets on November 26, 2023, when he had an 8/107/1 line on ten targets. Since that point, he’s averaged 9.1 targets, 6.7 receptions, and 76.5 yards per game (with 10 touchdowns in those 18 games). This paces out to 154 targets, 113 catches, 1300 yards, and 9.5 touchdowns per season.
But here’s the rub with Rice: he does not get targets downfield. He had 24 targets over 10 yards last season, 11 over 15, and 4 targets over 20 yards last year. This is why he is so good for fantasy football, and so insulated against any sort of week-to-week busting. The Chiefs don’t do anything with him but ceaselessly and mercilessly make the PPR machine go brr. I understand that traditionally, you want to collect yardage, but don’t forget that fantasy football is about collecting points, not yardage. And a PPR reception is worth ten PPR yards. And Rashee Rice and his piddly little dumpoff bullshit passes maximize that.
Those piddly little dumpoffs are a massive part of the Chiefs’ offense, too. He ranked first in red zone target share and first in designed target share. He was eleventh in yards after the catch last season despite playing just eight games. Among wide receivers with at least 50 targets last season, he ranked first in yards after the catch per reception at 7.98. So, Mahomes does the easy part, and Rice is exceptional at the hard part (or Andy Reid scheming the hard part).
Excluding his injury game where he got hurt after four snaps, he’s been a WR1 62% of the time, a WR1 or WR2 81% of the time, and he has just one bust game in his 21 games since his first 10 target game back in 2023… and he was WR41!
Overvalued: Kenneth Walker III, Running Back (RB11, Pick 19 OVR)
The backfield is led by Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker, who the Chiefs signed this offseason to a 3-year, $43M contract. The idea is that Kenneth Walker takes over this backfield as the Chiefs’ undisputed RB1, with Brashard Smith and Emmett Johnson taking complementary roles. Some worry about Walker’s usage with the Chiefs, as he had the #30 opportunity share last season (51.3%). This completely ignores his NFL usage beforehand, as he ranked thirteenth (65.3%), 14th (67.67%), and eleventh (72.5%) in 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively. His average finish in those three seasons was RB16. Walker can and has handled being a team’s undisputed RB1 in the past, but because we all have the memory of goldfish, folks believe that his 51.3% is the new normal. He played all 17 games last season for the first time in his career, but in his four seasons, he played 15, 15, and 11 games. So again, one real injury-marred season and people think it’s all over for Walker.
Personally, I think that if you go out and give the Super Bowl MVP almost $45M, you plan on using him. Walker has a great mixed-use skill set, as he can run the ball exceptionally well and is a perfectly cromulent pass catcher. He profiles as an NFL RB1 and should hit double-digit touchdowns for the first time in his career as the lead back in a prodigious offense.
There’s not much to say about Walker; he reminds me of late-career Frank Gore since he will get a bunch of touches, score a bunch of touchdowns, and both run & catch the football. He’s a top-fifteen option who has a low chance of busting outside of injury. Unfortunately, people are spamming him into the top ten, which I cannot co-sign.
