The first round of roster cuts for NFL teams is on August 30th, and each team will have to trim their rosters from 90 players to 80 players at that point. The final cuts are on September 3rd and all teams must be down the 53 players at that time.
One of the most intriguing positional groups heading into cut-time for the Kansas City Chiefs is the secondary. They have a lot of young talent that is already set up to start on their first-team defense with Brandon Flowers, Brandon Carr, Eric Berry and Kendrick Lewis. Throw in Javier Arenas and Jalil Brown as as second-year player and a rookie that are also locks to make the squad. Then it becomes pretty interesting.
One of the most debated players in the secondary right now is veteran safety, Jon McGraw. Coach Haley has gone as far to say that McGraw is still in the running for a spot on the first-team defense. From kcchiefs.com
"Obviously, Jon McGraw is there, and he’s not out of the mix to even be out front in the mix," Haley said.
I would venture to guess that McGraw could be in the mix for the first-team defense. But I don't think that Haley would come right at this point and declare Kendrick Lewis as the starter. But regardless of who is considered the "starter", Jon McGraw will be on the team and will contribute to the defense and special teams. A lot of fans like to talk about the Ravens game and how McGraw didn't play well in that game. In all fairness, if we didn't give roster spots to everyone that didn't play well in the playoff blowout last season then we might be looking for more than just depth in the secondary.
Lewis will be the starter but McGraw could find himself in the game in certain situations in sub packages as said by Josh Looney in his report on kcchiefs.com.
Jon McGraw is the veteran of the bunch, re-signing with the Chiefs as an unrestricted free agent this offseason and finding himself in the mix of numerous sub-package sets with the first-team defense. He’s worked with the second-team in base alignment throughout the preseason.
The real question marks in the secondary come down to Reshard Langford, Donald Washington, Sabby Piscitelli, Travis Daniels, Ricky Price and Quentin Lawrence. I personally believe that Washington and Daniels would be the front-runners in this group at this point in time. But we have two more preseason games and they are going to be extremely important for this group of players.