(Almost) football is so back, and so is all-22 film.
I cannot begin to describe how good it felt to see the Chiefs take the field again on Saturday afternoon. After all the frustration and letdowns of the 2025 season, watching a new group of players have the opportunity to flash their potential felt like a brand new start. Which of course it is, for the Chiefs as well as 31 other NFL teams.
There were a LOT of things to look at from Kansas City’s preseason opener, from Emmett Johnson to Jaden Hicks to Cyrus Allen to Peter Woods to more under center looks to Garrett Nussmeier (no, I’m not kidding at all) to a whole lot more. But the first guy I want to talk about is pass rusher R Mason Thomas, who made an impression in his first outing as a Chief.
Thomas, who was affectionally dubbed “the closer” by Oklahoma fans during his college tenure, was brought on board to help the Chiefs’ pass rush. And based on his college film, there was a lot of reason to be optimistic that he could do so.
The primary question for Thomas, a guy with exceptional burst off the line and a terrific 2nd and 3rd step to the top of the arc, is whether or not he’ll be able to have the entire toolkit necessary to be a consistent pass rusher at the next level. The other question is whether he’ll be able to hold up enough against the run to be more than just a pass rush specialist.
We obviously don’t know a LOT more about Thomas now than we did on Friday, but we do know more after he played a fair number of snaps against the Rams (it should be noted that LA did not play their starting tackles, so that has to be taken into account with everything we look at). Most people will want to start with his half-ending hit on the quarterback, which is of course what you want to see from a guy called “the closer.” But it’s more important to look at what he did on a snap by snap basis.
To do that, I went back and reviewed every snap Thomas took against the Rams (the all-22 came out FAST, which was quite nice), charting for wins, losses, and neutral plays against the pass and the run while also charting pressures/hits/sacks, run stuffs, and effective double teams forced. Those numbers themselves aren’t all that important given the small sample size, but they allow us to get an idea as to what he was doing on a snap by snap basis in terms of wins/losses, and show what kind of impact he was able to make.
The important thing in preseason games, to be clear, isn’t necessarily the charted numbers (though that matters), but rather the traits that are shown in these snaps and whether or not they seem translatable to success long-term. But of course, it DOES matter what a player does on a snap by snap basis when you’re trying to project forward, as consistency is what separates mediocre players from good players.
Here are the numbers for Thomas.
For starters, I need to remind you again that the Rams were not playing their starting offensive line. Additionally, it’s worth noting that because LA utilizes so much under center play action in their offense on early downs that true pass rush opportunities were relatively hard to come by on Saturday (hence, all the “neutral” pass rush snaps). With those important caveats in mind, there are a couple things to note about those numbers.
The first and most obvious are those 5 pass rush wins. That number actually surprised me a bit. While Thomas clearly played well while watching the broadcast, I wouldn’t have pegged him for quite that many wins. That said, on re-watching you could see him winning a few reps where the ball came out so quickly that it was easy to miss in real time. But that doesn’t make it any less of a “win” for the pass rusher in that scenario, as it means the ball HAD to come out to avoid problems for the offense.
This actually started with Thomas’s first snap of the game, coming on 3rd and 3 on the Rams first drive. Watch Thomas from the left defensive end spot.
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