KANSAS CITY — Seven months after the ACL tear that stopped him at midfield in December, Patrick Mahomes ran full 11-on-11 drills at Chiefs camp last week, and Andy Reid described it, with characteristic understatement, as “a positive.” That qualifier — not great, not back to normal, just positive — carries the story of where Kansas City stands as the 2026 NFL preseason opens. The Chiefs enter this week carrying a 6-11 record from 2025, the worst season Mahomes has had as a professional, and a rehabilitation timeline that Reid has been deliberately vague about.
Across the conference, in Jacksonville, the numbers are running the other way. Trevor Lawrence ranked third in expected points added per dropback and fifth in QBR in the second half of the 2025 season, and the Jaguars turned that production into a Wild Card berth. Now they are in camp under first-year head coach Liam Coen, and the early returns from training camp suggest Lawrence’s late-season form carried over. The two teams will not meet in the 2026 regular season. Kansas City occupies the AFC West; Jacksonville the AFC South. But as the preseason opens this week and each franchise begins to show what it actually is, their divergence is striking enough to examine directly.
The Chiefs’ rebuilding effort is shaped by a single, unavoidable question: is Mahomes the quarterback who won back-to-back Super Bowls, or is he 30 and coming off a torn ACL with a receiver room that could not sign Stefon Diggs? Diggs ended up in Washington. The most notable addition at wide receiver is Cyrus Allen, a rookie with potential and no professional track record. Second-round pick Peter Woods is expected to help a pass rush that ranked among the league’s least productive in 2025. Eric Bieniemy returned as offensive coordinator after a genuinely devastating family situation — his wife Mia was shot at their Virginia home in late July — and has not yet had a normal week of camp preparation.
Patrick Mahomes took full team reps at Arrowhead last week, and the pace of that work suggests the knee is managing what the offseason reports promised. But Reid confirmed he is leaning against having Mahomes play in the preseason opener against the Rams on August 15. The calculation — protect the quarterback, give the knee more runway — is sensible. What nobody in Kansas City knows yet is whether September 14, when the Chiefs open against Denver on Monday Night Football, will look like January 2024 Mahomes or December 2025 Mahomes. Travis Kelce, whose physical conditioning has attracted camp commentary that Reid has repeatedly rebutted, is working through that answer alongside him.
The franchise’s six primetime games in 2026 — reflecting the NFL’s continued belief in the Mahomes commercial draw — now carry a different weight than they did when the schedule was released in May. Then, the ACL was a background concern and the Mahomes brand was insurance enough. Now, the primetime schedule reads as a series of examinations the Chiefs will have to pass in real time, under lights, with the full national audience watching for signs of a decline or a return.
Jacksonville’s situation is cleaner and, for the moment, more promising. Liam Coen inherited a roster with a quarterback trending upward and a first-round talent in Travis Hunter who is already making the two-way experiment look less like a novelty and more like a structural advantage. Hunter, the 2025 first-round pick who plays both receiver and cornerback, returned to Jaguars camp after a shoulder injury ended his rookie season early, going up for contested balls on Day 1 without adjustment or hesitation. Coen confirmed the dual role is permanent, not a transition arrangement.
Parker Washington is having the kind of training camp that tends to accelerate contract negotiations, which is the Jaguars’ immediate front-office problem: his extension remains unsigned as his workload grows. Brian Thomas Jr. told reporters he is healthy in the way that carries a different weight after a season with nagging issues. Antonio Johnson has exceeded expectations at safety. B.J. Green II had a dominant performance in the team’s mock scrimmage. The one significant concern is Walker Little’s availability on the offensive line, and how Jacksonville resolves that before Week 1 at Cleveland on September 13 will say something about the depth the team actually has behind its starters.
The Jaguars also carry an unusual two-game international assignment in October: Eagles at Tottenham Hotspur on October 11, Texans at Wembley on October 18, both London starts before their bye week. Two road games in a foreign time zone in consecutive weeks is not a minor scheduling quirk under any head coach. Under a first-year head coach still building a weekly preparation routine, as CBS Sports schedule data confirmed, it becomes a genuine early-season test of how Coen manages the logistical load. Lawrence will need to perform through jet lag and unfamiliar environments twice in a row, and the offensive line situation needs resolution before that stretch begins.
The historical record between these franchises is thin by modern NFL standards. Their most significant recent meeting came in January 2023, when Kansas City defeated Jacksonville 27-20 in an AFC Divisional Round game at TIAA Bank Field, the postseason encounter that most Jaguars fans cite when explaining what the franchise’s ceiling has looked like in practice. Mahomes outdueled Lawrence in a game that felt like a passing of the torch that did not quite complete the transfer. Kansas City went on to win the Super Bowl. Before that, a memorable Monday Night Football game in which Lawrence led Jacksonville to a victory over the Chiefs gave that fan base one of the evenings that sustains a program through lean years.
The gap since then — in wins, in playoff appearances, in the fundamental stability of both organizations — has been narrowing. Kansas City remained the standard through 2024, then had 2025 happen. Jacksonville made the Wild Card in 2025, then hired a new head coach and handed him a roster that looks, from the outside, like one with enough pieces to sustain that trajectory. Whether Coen is the right coach for that particular set of pieces is exactly the kind of question that preseason games cannot answer and regular-season Sundays will.
In 2026, there will not be a Chiefs-Jaguars game. The AFC West and AFC South do not cross in this scheduling cycle, and neither franchise will serve as the other’s mirror or obstacle. What they share is a conference and a season that will determine, for each of them, whether 2025 was a detour or a direction. Kansas City needs Mahomes’s knee to cooperate. Jacksonville needs Liam Coen to figure out January faster than most first-year coaches do. Both of those answers are currently unanswered, and will remain so until the schedule delivers them one week at a time.
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