Dumb.
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"...But just a little bit (of time) to maybe sit back and watch a little bit, watch from the sideline, maybe that will help your confidence...."

yeah that old tried and true "benching a guy to build their confidence" tactic.
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Hardman's snap counts are way up. People are putting way too much stock in one game.

And FTR, his ST snaps were already WAY down this year before this. He hasn't been playing as much ST all year.
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And, it would appear that Melvin Gordon (hip issue) is 50/50 on playing this week... that will suck a bit as he and Williams have been a solid duo. If it falls on the rookie, guess we'll see if he's ready to carry the load.
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They're up from last year because we lost Sammy.

The point I'm making is the recent trend. Hardman played 0 special teams snaps in the last game. In every other game this season, he's played at least one. Based on these comments by Toub, that was done on purpose. They're benching Hardman on PR in favor of Hughes.

In addition to that, for the first several weeks of the season, Hardman was good for anywhere between 50-75% of the team's offensive snaps. When we played the Raiders he logged only 31% of snaps and then against the Cowboys only 17% of snaps.

We never truly know what's going on behind the scenes, but this seems like a pretty clear demotion.
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Last-place schedule explains most of it.

Jets, Jags & Giants (the latter when they were most gimped up). Meh.

Barely beat the Generics at home with plenty of help from the refs.

Caught a beat-up and overrated Cowboys squad on a flat day.

Not sure how they managed to win last week. Best guess is that they drew Jekyll instead of Hyde out of the Chugger deck.

That won't happen here.

I'm more worried about the Raiders the following week, and since they don't worry me at all, that tells you all you need to know. :-)
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Hardman has only played 30 ST snaps ALL YEAR. If the narrative is that he's been benched then we should probably talk about the other 5 weeks where he didn't return any punts, starting in week 4. This isn't new. Apparently nobody noticed until now that Hardman hasn't been playing ST hardly at all for almost 2 months.

It does. But then again, it's only 2 weeks. You can't really form a trend on 2 weeks.
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Carl Fucking Cheffers scares me. I feel like we're going to have to completely dominate them to win. If it's close, he'll fuck us.
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That's not the narrative, bro. That is literally what Toub is telling us lol
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And what I'm saying is that you're getting hung up on the when, not the what.

Toub is telling us NOW what is going on but it actually happened several weeks ago, at least when it comes to punt returns.
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This is a weird argument.. I'm not hung up on anything. The when and the what are both relevant.

We've been working Hughes in at PR for a while now because we don't trust Hardman back there.

Aka, we don't trust Mecole not to muff the punt or field it inside the 10 yard line.

At the same time that they completely take Hardman off ST duty, which, again, was intentional:

They are also significantly reducing his offensive snap count.

It seems apparent that the coaching staff as a whole is disappointed in Hardman.
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I think it's a positive that he's getting more snaps on the offense. It's like he graduated from ST to offense.

I could be wrong.
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Anyway, back to the game.

This really should be a Chiefs win, but no matter what it is a divisional game. Anything can happen.

What will LIKELY happen is that the Chiefs will friggin' dominate. Seriously, they do not match up with the Chiefs in any good way on either side of the ball. They have a good running back, but he ain't Barry Sanders FFS. The Chiefs shut DOWN the Packers 2-headed rushing attack, and they took care of business with Elliot with Dallas. They have some receivers who are decent to good, but none of them are scary dominators. The Defense has found their stride, taking much pressure off the offense, who are due to get back to consistently beating the shit out of teams.

This may be the best post-bye season we've seen. The stars are aligning...we ain't losing to these bitches on Sunday night at home after a bye.
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I mentioned this to smaqe daddy already, but his snap count is up overall from 2020, but that's because we lost Watkins. He played 45% of offensive snaps in 2020 and has logged 56% of offensive snaps this season. At the same time, his ST snaps have taken a nosedive from 38% last season to 11% this season.. so you are right in a way. They were clearly trying to work him more into the offense.

BUT, he only logged 31% of offensive snaps three weeks ago against the Raiders and 17% of offensive snaps two weeks ago against the Cowboys, which is wayyyyy down from his season average.

You can find more info here: https://www.pro-football-reference.c...0/fantasy/2021
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I'm fine with this. Hughes is a better returner. He has that one fumble (can't remember against who) but it's not like Hardman is Mr. Reliable when it comes to holding onto the ball, either.
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