Scorched Earth: Xavier Worthy is only getting started with the Kansas City Chiefs
He thought the Buffalo Bills were going to draft him. Instead, the rookie has a chance to be special in Kansas City. How did the NFL let this happen? We chat with the WR and his coach.
NEW ORLEANS — The visit, in his mind, was a smashing success. Xavier Worthy was designated one of the Buffalo Bills’ Top 30 visits ahead of the 2024 NFL Draft and the team made it abundantly clear they were in the market for a wide receiver. On his visit, he was joined by Florida State wideout Keon Coleman and others.
His freshest memory? Chatting with Joe Brady. Worthy grew an instant kinship with this offensive coordinator who was both exceptionally bright and ego-less.
Here at the New Orleans Marriott, closing in on the biggest game of his football life, Worthy thinks back to those conversations. Together, the two imagined how Worthy could fit into this offense. They talked. Nonstop, as he recalls. “Joe Brady is my guy,” says the 5-foot-11, 165-pounder who clocked the fastest time ever at the NFL Combine.
This was more than a whimsical daydream. Worthy left the facilities at One Bills Drive genuinely believing he’d be a Bill.
“Talking to them and the way it was talked upon, it was ‘We like you. If you’re there, we’re going to grab you,’” Worthy says. “And then the fact that they traded away the pick to the team that drafted me, it was like, ‘Oh, we didn’t want you.’ So it just struck a little fire under me.”
When the Chiefs and Bills inevitably met in the AFC Championship Game, he kept that fire burning.
“It was something that went back in the memory bank like ‘OK, it’s motivation. This is meant to be for you,’” Worthy says. “That gave me more motivation.”
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The night of April 25, 2024, practically everyone outside of Kansas City went full Jesse Pinkman in screeching: They can’t keep getting away with this! How could Xavier Worthy, thee of 4.21 speed, team up with Patrick Mahomes, owner of three Lombardi Trophies and counting? It didn’t seem logical. The Chiefs draft at the bottom of the first round each spring yet — somehow — managed to find another Tyreek Hill. Bonkers. Unfair. A cruel flashback to the day Buffalo handed the same organization its Canton-bound quarterback. Here at Go Long, we praised the fearlessness of Bills GM Brandon Beane that night because to slay the Kansas City Chiefs you cannot be afraid of the Chiefs. For better or worse, he didn’t give a damn who Andy Reid coveted at the 28th overall selection. “What’s the best move for the Bills?’” Beane said that night.
Apparently, the best move was not adding the diminutive, yet hypersonic Xavier Worthy. Buffalo preferred to add some draft capital and infuse their offense with a more brute specimen in Keon Coleman five picks down. Beane was correct to note after the 2024 season that nobody’s fitted for gold jacket or kicked out of the NFL after their rookie year. This debate is far from over. And yet — as it pertains to Worthy — the early signs are unequivocally horrifying for, not just the Bills, but all other 31 teams in the NFL. Here in New Orleans, we chatted with both Worthy and Chiefs wide receivers coach Connor Embree to piece together how the union materialized and, most importantly, what’s next.
Nobody should be surprised if Worthy detonates in Super Bowl LIX against the Philadelphia Eagles. Raw speed can incinerate the most complex of gameplans.
Nobody should be surprised if Worthy lights up defenses for years as the latest game-nuking receiving threat in this Kansas City offense.
History’s rich with players mythologizing their rise. It’s hard to see any team in a formal capacity telling a player he will be their draft pick before turning in a card. But that’s how Worthy interpreted his dialogue with the team and, however that Top 30 visit went down, the Bills obviously did not want this type of receiver in their offense.
Worthy is glad things worked out.
“Couldn’t ask for a better place.”
Here’s how it went down.
Two weeks after the confetti rained in Las Vegas, the Chiefs’ scouting staff pieced together a list of wide receiver prospects for Embree to study. It didn’t take long for Worthy’s footage to stand out. He was obviously blazing fast but that’s not what Embree truly appreciated most. No. 1, he loved that Worthy refused to tapdance around the sport’s inherent violence. He did not play like hundreds of small receivers who came before him. Mainly because this was not the dreaded track guy — Worthy makes a point in our conversation to stress that he played football before track. Long ago, he signed that virtual contract with the sport. He survived those hitting drills that typically scare off kids his size and decided, yes, this sport was for him.
On tape, it showed. Worthy rarely ever stepped out of bounds, or slid, or hid from contact. Au contraire. Embree saw multiple clips of Worthy actively trying to run over defenders. He muscled through tackles and hit the jets.
On to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, Worthy sat down with the head coach Reid, GM Brett Veach, Embree and several Chiefs scouts for an 18-minute speed date.
That’s when another trait popped: his football IQ.
The assistant coach showed Worthy approximately 20 plays from his college tape and told him: “Act like I’m a freshman at Texas and explain everything you can remember.” His split. His route. All extra coaching points. Everything he saw in the defense’s coverage. Many times, kids don’t remember any details. Their college playbook is essentially that Ancient Greece class you took in a lecture hall to fulfill a credit requirement — in one ear, out the other by the time that B arrives. Some blatantly lie to the coach’s face in a failed attempt to survive the exercise. Embree will show the same play in different games and a wideout will offer completely different details… which obviously speaks to a lack of character.
Worthy aced his test.
On this same visit, Reid showed Worthy clips of DeSean Jackson. “Does this look familiar?” the wide receiver remembers him asking. Did it ever. Growing up, Worthy’s favorite receiver — in a landslide — was Jackson. Both were from Cali. And in Jackson, in a playmaker who totaled 11,000+ receiving yards through a 15-year career, he saw tangible proof that a bantam-sized wide receiver could terrorize defenses. He also watched film of West Virginia’s Tavon Austin. Ironic considering the question on the minds of all NFL GMs was if the dynamo who caught 197 balls for 2,755 yards with 26 touchdowns in three years at Texas would blossom in the pros like Jackson (whom Reid selected 49th overall in 2008) or flounder like Austin (whom went eighth overall to the St. Louis Rams.) At West Virginia, Austin was electric. In the pros, however, the 5-foot-8, 178-pounder proved too small. He totaled only 509 receiving yards in his best season.
Worthy is a little taller and also loves to tell Embree he’s “175 pounds,” which Embree never buys. Maybe if Worthy had heavy bags of coins in each pocket and was fresh off a heaping serving of Kansas City’s finest barbecue.
Miss on a light receiver, Embree admits, and there’s really nowhere you can put him on offense. Miss and you’re praying the pipsqueak can return kicks to justify his roster spot. He gets why teams shy away.
“That’s the risk of drafting someone that is ‘undersized’ or ‘too small,’” says Embree. “But if you go back and watch his tape, he didn’t play that way. He didn’t play where he was scared to get hit. He didn’t play like he was 150 pounds. You never really saw anyone just manhandle him on tape where you might fear that in the NFL.”
Truth is, Worthy’s been fighting this perception his entire life. He’s visibly pissed thinking back to how long peers and coaches in the sport have overlooked him. On his youth teams, Worthy was always the runt. Even after graduating high school, he was all of 145 pounds soaking wet. Thus, it was easy to stereotype him as a 100-meter sprinter who aimlessly wandered into a tackle football game. Skeptics always had the order of operations all wrong. Worthy used track as a tool to boost his football game, crediting high school track coach Cedric Pulliam for sharpening his sprinting form. Learning how to explode out of blocks and extend his stride on the track fed all of those plays at Texas.
“Everybody doubted me,” Worthy says. “I’m just coming in and proving them wrong. I’ve been hearing it my whole life. … Put on my film. You don’t see ‘gadget guy’ or ‘reverse guy’ or ‘jet sweep guy.’ You put him on film, you see a guy that can run routes or take the top off or catch it intermediate go to the house. People downplayed my film.”
Not the Chiefs.
Embree brings up several collegiate plays. After cradling a shallow cross, he turned the corner and took one 50+ yards to paydirt. Several times, he’d catch a ball in the middle of the field and refuse to slide to comfort. “Instead,” Embree says, “he tried to actually run someone over, which is crazy at his size.” All of it reminded him of what he saw out of the player Kansas City drafted one year prior: Rashee Rice. “He was not running from contact. Both have that same mindset.” The coach allowed himself to get excited about the possibility of adding the next DeSean Jackson to his meeting room and — as fast as you count to Four Mississippi — that excitement evaporated. After Worthy shattered Chris Johnson’s 40-yard dash record, Embree was convinced there was zero chance the receiver would trickle down to the bottom of Round 1.
Draft Day arrived and Worthy started to fall. And fall. And the four-hour bonanza took a toll on the Fresno, Cali, native. He was confused. He had watched film on all receivers in his class and sincerely believed he was capable of doing everything they could on the field. “And,” he adds, “I’m faster.” Suddenly the Bills were on the clock and Beane was willing to trade the pick to Kansas City.
Worthy couldn’t believe it.
Embree couldn’t believe it.
“Especially knowing us and the Bills rivalry,” Embree says, “and how we go head-to-head pretty much every year. I was surprised they traded with us. I know there’s teams out there — even NFC teams — they don’t want to trade with us, which I get. They don’t want to help us out. I was very shocked that it was the Bills. That told me obviously they didn’t want him.”
Unlike others, the Chiefs had a vision for Worthy. Shortly after drafting him, Reid set up a call between Worthy and the ex-Eagle Jackson. In the rookie, he saw the same downfield threat who could play both in the slot and on the boundary. Not some jet-sweeping doohickey.
Less than four games in, the timeline accelerated. Right as Rice was ascending into a star, he tore his ACL against the Los Angeles Chargers. Right when Rice was improvising on second reaction to a Prime Kelce-extremes, he was done for the season.
“It was like him and Trav, where no matter what the defense does, they’re going to be wrong because they’re on the same page,” says Embree, who’s also the son of one of the best tight ends coaches ever in Jon Embree. “So I felt bad for him. But you can’t really be down too long because we’ve got to keep it moving. I try to make it in my room where now someone else has to step up. It’s an opportunity for everyone else in the room to go make the name for themselves.
“Xavier started to step up. I tried to challenge him. Rashee did the same thing last year. He kind of came in as the rookie and wasn’t the No. 1 guy, but by the end of the season he was our No. 1 receiver. So same now: ‘Xavier, now it’s your turn. Don’t wait just because you’re a rookie. Don’t wait, like I'll do it next year. Nah, take it and run with it.’”
Words Worthy took to heart on Nov. 17. Both point to the first Bills-Chiefs game as the turning point.
The week of that game, Embree pulled Worthy aside and gently reminded him of draft day. “They could have taken you,” he said, “and they gave us the pick.” He didn’t want the 21-year-old harping on the snub but Embree knew a hearty dose of motivation never hurts. He’s seen Mahomes and Kelce do the same thing. Part of him believes there’s a little something extra to the QB’s game against Buffalo for the same exact reason — they passed. “The season’s long,” Embree says, “so any motivation you can find throughout the season to help you get a little extra done, you want to use it.”
Buffalo won that first meeting but Worthy caught four of his five targets for 61 yards, including a touchdown. Embree brings up a deep crossing route. “He had to fight off the line,” he says, “and then he caught it and got smacked by the safety.” Later that drive, Worthy recognized Buffalo was in Cover 2, nestled into the zone and Mahomes got it to him quick. And it sure appeared this game meant something extra — Worthy was quite animated in signaling first downs and emphatically chucked the football into the stands after a TD at the pylon.
This night, the Chiefs’ coaching staff began to view Worthy as a legitimate No. 1 wide receiver.
Everything they saw back in college was now showing up in the pros. Those sterling statistics in the Big 12 were never inflated by an Air Raid-like scheme spreading defenses out in five-wide. He wasn’t simply devouring 1-on-1 coverage vs. slow corners. Nor was he running go route after go route. The Chiefs knew that Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian, a former Atlanta Falcons OC, implemented NFL concepts. Sarkisian actually ran some of the exact same plays as Reid. He’d get “Tiger” personnel with two tight ends and run hard play-action. Receivers needed to think on the fly in two-man routes.
Says Worthy: “After that first Bills game, it shifted. I started to catch a rhythm, build a lot of chemistry with Pat and it started clicking.”
To get on Mahomes’ level, Worthy started spending more time with the man who’s caught the most passes in postseason history. Tight end Travis Kelce detailed where exactly the QB wants his routes broken off and when it’s OK to improvise. And these last nine games, Worthy has 50 receptions for 522 yards with four touchdowns. He saved his best performance of the season for the Bills in the AFC Championship. Once the game began, Worthy insists nothing was running through his mind that night at Arrowhead. All he cared about was making plays.
Honestly, all parties can be happy in the end. Beane indicated on draft weekend that Josh Allen was a fan of Coleman. The quarterback likely preferred a bigger body. Acknowledging that the two receivers are polar opposites, Embree says he comp’d Coleman to Anquan Boldin before the draft.
“He didn’t create too much separation down at the college level,” Embree says. “But if it was a 50/50 ball, he was coming down with it. He played very strong. He had strong hands. I really liked his run after the catch.”
Embree sees striking similarities in the maturation of both quarterbacks, too.
Once each lost their longtime No. 1 receivers, they started to read the field with more diligence. They weren’t worried about getting one player the ball 10+ times. Maybe Coleman takes Beane’s critique to heart, and shows up for OTAs a determined pro. The GM indicated the rookie wasn’t the same player after returning from a wrist injury, wasn’t nearly as physical when physicality must be the bedrock of his game.
For Worthy, the final two months of the season were a different story.
Sure, there’s a lot of Jackson to his game. But he’s even looked better than Tyreek Hill did during his rookie season in 2016 and — now? — Worthy believes he’s being used in the same way Hill was at his peak with Mahomes.
“They were creative with him,” Worthy says. “Tyreek Hill was doing the same thing I was doing. He was in the backfield. He was in motion. Whether he’s running a jet sweep, he’s running a post, he’s running a drag.”
The Eagles’ defensive backs will be ready on Sunday. Defensive backs coach Christian Parker took over the worst secondary in the NFL and turned it into one of the best with a pair of his own rookies. For all the talk about Saquon! and Kelce! here in NOLA, Super Bowl LIX may boil down to a rookie Cooper DeJean chasing around Kansas City’s rookie.
No longer is the receiver seated here concerned about just one team.
On Sunday, Xavier Worthy has an opportunity to prove the entire league wrong.
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One more thing. It is an incredible tribute to your credibility that Sean McDermott would sit down with you for a long interview after your investigative three part series revealing his flaws.
That is what I call respect. He must’ve seen some truth in what you wrote.
Tyler,
Another great piece, leaving me stunned how in the world you get these sources to sit down with you and go over deep history, during Super Bowl week no less.
How long of an interview did you get with Worthy and how did you get it? What about the background from the coaches with the bills and the Chiefs?
Truly amazing!
What makes this more remarkable is we are living in an age in which the NFL teams try to control every interaction between their players and sports media. I started my career as a sports journalist, and back then I could go into the locker room before and after games — and also arrange other interview times through the PR staff or just asking a player directly.
I’m not bragging (ok, maybe a little) but I recall interviewing Kevin McHale and Larry Bird as they were getting taped before a game against the Milwaukee Bucks. All I had was my reporters notebook and no one seemed to be in a hurry.
I think women sportswriters should get equal access as the men, but once women started coming into the locker room with all these naked men, that was the beginning of the end of unique quotes and access. They started bringing the players out to the podium for canned quotes that everyone else got.
Sure, if you are Stephen A. smith or Michael Strahan. you can probably get a one on one with Worthy.
But you are Tyler Dunne working for himself with no ads!
Tyler, you have great knowledge of the game and really know how to weave a compelling narrative. but I think your greatest strength beyond the amazing accomplishment of getting Bob McGinn out of his turtle shell and turning him into a likable human being (with a high golf handicap) is your incredible reporting, based in large part on getting access to these players and coaches.
I don’t want you to give away trade secrets, but I’m sure many people would be fascinated and in awe with a podcast or article or something – maybe even a book – describing how you do it!
Keep Going Long!