Kansas City Chiefs HC Andy Reid has made his first public comments since the Tyreek Hill trade.
The NFL’s annual owners’ meeting is taking place at The Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida over the next few days. Speaking to reporters ahead of the festivities, Reid was asked about how the team handled the contract situation with Tyreek Hill that ultimately led to his trade from Kansas City.
“You can handle it any way you want to handle it. We handled it the way we did there,” Reid said, via Pro Football Talk’s Charean Williams. “We felt like Tyreek deserved an opportunity. We came in aggressive and then after we got to a point, we just said, ‘Hey, listen, in this day and age, you have issues that you have to deal with with the cap,’ so we felt like it was better to allow him to go ahead and be traded. You can go different routes. You can play hardball with a player and do that, or you can kind of go about the way I did. Or we did.”
There was no love lost between Hill and the Chiefs. No irreconcilable rift. It was simply a matter of doing what was best for both parties. Kansas City felt they’d made a number of aggressive offers to keep Hill, but ultimately came to the conclusion that with salary cap constraints it wasn’t the right move for the team. Instead of trying to play “hardball” and force Hill to play out his contract, the team decided to sell high.
“Listen, the cap never gets far away from your thought process, because you’re always dealing with it,” Reid continued. “So (General Manager) Brett (Veach) has got to sit in there and manage that with his guys and if you want to keep consistency throughout years you’ve got to be able to do that and still stay at a high level. So I love Tyreek Hill. There was no rift between Tyreek Hill and myself. I thought he deserved an opportunity if that’s where he wanted to go. He’s a family man with a few kids, and he’s got to be able to support them now and down the road and this gives him an opportunity to do that. Put him a place where he has a home, and at the same time, it gave us great compensation.”
As for the compensation, Reid believes it’s a big part of why the team will remain competitive. That will allow the Chiefs an opportunity to continue to build around Patrick Mahomes, both with draft capital and the $72.2 million in guaranteed money that they’re not spending on Hill over the next four years.
“Obviously, Patrick’s a big part of that (belief the team can remain competitive),” Reid said. “You want to surround him with good players, but that’s a sticky question, because we did try to sign Tyreek at a certain cost. Once it gets past that, now you can see what we’re doing here with the players we brought in, and we feel they’re very good football players. So we’ll see. I mean the end result is going to be what takes place during the season, but Brett’s building this thing back where we feel comfortable that we can go win on Sundays.”