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Adam Teicher, ESPN Staff Writer
THE FIRST DAY of wide receiver Rashee Rice’s NFL career was a mess — literally. In the middle of a drill at his initial Kansas City Chiefs training camp and struggling in the summer heat, Rice threw up.
Rice and the Chiefs knew better days were ahead, but they didn’t know those days would happen for him so quickly.
Rice wound up leading the Chiefs’ wide receivers by wide margins during the regular season in catches (79), yards (938) and touchdowns (7). His was the best season for a rookie wide receiver in the 25-year head-coaching career of Andy Reid, whose previous rookie receivers include Tyreek Hill, DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin.
Rice has 20 catches for 223 yards in the three playoff games and scored the Chiefs’ first postseason touchdown on an 11-yard catch from Patrick Mahomes in the wild-card round win over the Miami Dolphins. He had eight catches for 130 yards that night.
All of this was more than the Chiefs anticipated from Rice as a rookie when they drafted him from SMU in the second round.
Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy described Rice as drinking from a fire hydrant at full power in terms of how much information the Chiefs were sending his way during training camp. He dropped some passes early in the season, a sign that he was thinking about his assignments rather than playing loosely.
“We were talking about in training camp him getting in and out of the huddle and getting lined up and just trying to run the play the right way,” Nagy said. “He’s way past that now. Now he gets up to the line of scrimmage, he’s seeing what the defense does and now he can let his natural ability take over. Probably midseason or around that time is when I felt like it clicked.
“The beauty is that he wants to be coached. He wants more.”
As veteran wide receivers Skyy Moore, Kadarius Toney and Marquez Valdes-Scantling slumped, the Chiefs started to turn more and more to Rice to deliver big plays.
The rookie recovered from his messy start to become one of Mahomes’ go-to receivers as the Chiefs pushed through the playoffs and into Super Bowl LVIII, where they will face the San Francisco 49ers (6:30 p.m. ET, Feb. 11, CBS).
“He’s still got a lot he can improve on, which is crazy to say [because] he’s had such a great season,” Mahomes said. “The little things that NFL receivers do — he’s got the explosiveness, he knows how to run the routes — but the nuance and the how you run the routes, how you set one route to run up another one … He listens and he learns as much as he can and tries to take that in. I think that’s why he’s gotten better and better as the season’s gone on.
“Some of those guys hit that rookie wall, and it seems like he just kind of pushed right through it and continues to get better and better.”
RICE COULD HAVE played another season at SMU but decided after catching 96 passes in 2022 and leading all FBS receivers in yards per game (113) he would head to the NFL.
Input from his college coaches was unanimous: He was ready.
“It just kind of got easy out there,” Rice said of his last season in college. “I knew I was ready my junior year, but we had some other receivers coming out so I waited for my moment so I could shine as the No. 1 receiver.”
SMU receivers coach Rob Likens, who previously worked with receivers Brandon Aiyuk and N’Keal Harry at Arizona State, joined Rice at SMU for what turned out to be the player’s final collegiate season. That was enough time to impress on Likens that Rice was perhaps the quickest learner he has coached.
Rice was mostly a slot receiver at SMU until Likens arrived and used him more as an outside receiver. The positions can be remarkably different, so Rice had to learn to do things a different way.
“We didn’t motion him a lot and we didn’t move him around,” Likens said. “He was stationary and so he got press coverage almost every snap. There’s an art to defeating press coverage.
“We would meet right before we would go to practice and I would tell him things about beating the press, like ‘Hey, try this.’ He could apply things at that day’s practice that were just talked about on a board or shown by somebody else doing it as an example on film. He can immediately take something that he sees or hears and he can apply it faster than anybody I’ve ever coached. I would tell him five different things in a meeting and he tried all five of them that day and he was successful doing it.”
Likens has a saying he uses with his receivers: “Don’t be soft,” which he will also shorten on occasion to DBS. The message is he doesn’t want his receivers to use excuses but to play through and conquer any obstacles they might face.
He didn’t have to hammer the point with Rice. After a few days with Likens, Rice went and had “DBS” tattooed on his hand.
“When he’s in his stance, he can see it,” Likens said.
AS THEY WERE preparing their draft board, the Chiefs asked Mahomes what he thought of Rice.
Rice lives near Dallas and was invited by Mahomes to participate in the offseason throwing sessions he organizes in the area. The workouts are more for Mahomes and the Chiefs’ receivers, but he’ll expand the group to draft-eligible receivers the Chiefs have an interest in.
Mahomes was impressed, particularly with Rice’s ability to run with the ball after the catch.
Rice was third in the league this season in yards after the catch with 654, this despite catching far fewer passes than CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys and Amon-Ra St. Brown of the Detroit Lions, the two players ahead of him.
The workouts left an impression on Rice, too.
“It’s just a different perspective when you’re watching on TV and you don’t have personal relationships with those guys [from] being a part of it and actually having to put your head down and grind to get where you want to,” Rice said.
Rice wound up finishing second on the Chiefs in catches and yards behind tight end Travis Kelce, though Rice scored two more touchdowns.
In Week 12 against the Las Vegas Raiders, the Chiefs were leading by four points and faced a third down from the Las Vegas 39 early in the fourth quarter. Mahomes threw to Rice on a shallow crossing route, and he took it for the touchdown that clinched the victory.
That game proved to be a turning point for Rice. In 10 games prior, Rice caught 36 passes. In the six after (he missed Week 18 with an injury), Rice had 43 catches.
“He’s come a long way and I think he’s still ascending as a player in this offense and it’s just been fun to see him rise to the occasion and really just catapult us in a lot of ways,” Kelce said. “It’s been awesome to see him accept the challenges every single week. … As a rookie you kind of get lost a little bit and he’s been focused throughout that and really hasn’t really hit a rookie wall as much as I did for sure.”
Rice has long moved past that first training camp practice. But he looks back on that day now with no shame.
“I don’t mind puking,” Rice said. “That just means I’m working as hard as I can.”