TLDR: I went into this expecting to find evidence to blame new receivers coach Embree for the offenses poor performance, but the numbers don’t really support that at all.

At the end of last year Joe Bleymaeir was promoted from Receivers Coach to Passing Game Co-Ordinator. He was replaced by Connor Embree.

Personnel wise, the only change to the Chiefs receiving core was replacing JuJu Smith-Schuster with Rashee Rice. Mecole Hardman, Skyy Moore, MVS, Justin Watson, and Kadarious Toney were all here last year.

Here are the catch % numbers and drop % numbers for all of those players in 2022 and 2023 (data taken from Fox Sports):

Mecole Hardman, Catches - 2022: 73.5% 2023: 80.0% Drops - 2022: 2.9% 2023: 10%

Skyy Moore, Catches - 2022: 66.7% 2023: 53.1% Drops - 2022: 3.6% 2023: 3.1%

MVS, Catches - 2022: 51.9% 2023: 51.9% Drops - 2022: 9.3% 2023: 3.7%

Justin Watson - 2022: 44.1% 2023: 52.8% Drops - 2022: 18.2% 2023: 5.6%

Kadarious Toney - 2022: 82.4% 2023: 73.3% Drops - 2022: 8% 2023: 10%

Total team drops last year: 34. Total team drops this year: 25, on pace for 43.

To put the Mahomes numbers for context, he has the same completion % as last year - 67.1, but he’s on pace for 500 fewer yards, 10 fewer touchdowns, 3 more picks and the lowest QBR of his career.

Taken from the Chiefs website, here is the relevant part of Embree’s bio:

Connor Embree returns for his fifth season with the Chiefs and enters the 2023 season as the team’s wide receivers coach after spending two seasons as an offensive quality control coach (2021-22) and two seasons as a defensive assistant (2019-20). 

I think there’s something off with how Fox counts drops, because they only have MVS listed as having 1 drop, but I’ve personally seen a lot more than 1 pass bounce off his hands this year.

So while the eye test certainly says the entire receiving corps has regressed, and with most of the same guys playing it’s logical to look at the changed coach, but the numbers say the guys are playing the same or better, the issue is that we don’t have anyone with anything close to JuJu’s numbers or rates, and we’ve replaced that production with a much larger featuring role of guys who just aren’t that good.

I think if Chris Jones didn’t have a pair of mentally feeble clowns as his agents and had agreed to a gigantic contract extension in any kind of reasonable time this summer, or had simply informed the team early on that he would not be doing so, then Veach would have been able to work the cap to sign someone to replace JuJu - like DeAndre Hopkins who mysteriously hung around free agency with tons of rumors connecting him to KC for months.

That said, I don’t know if its even possible to fix the WR issues until the offseason. None of these guys are actually performing much below their career averages, we’re not even on pace for that many more drops this year. This is just who these dudes are. JuJu was so important to the team last year because he was a high volume high catch guy, and we replaced him in the aggregate this year with a bunch of low volume low catch players.

That’s the big difference this year, Mahomes isn’t off, the coaching staff isn’t unable to coach, we just have a bunch of WR4-5s getting all of our targets, and they’re performing like limited players being overexposed, which is what they are.

*more Rashee Rice probably won’t fix any of these problems, he has 5 drops on the year so far, more than anyone else on the team.