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After enjoying their first-round playoff bye week, the No. 1 seed Kansas City Chiefs will be back in action on Saturday for a divisional round date with the No. 4 seed Houston Texans.
Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs' offense will need a strong showing to overcome Houston's defense, which intercepted Justin Herbert four times in the wild-card round.
While they won't have No. 1 wide receiver Rashee Rice this weekend — out since Sept. 29 after suffering a serious knee injury in Week 4 — the tiniest sliver of hope remains that the 24-year-old star could return for the Super Bowl on Feb. 9, should the Chiefs make it for the third consecutive season.
Rice shared a 41-second progress video on his Instagram story on Monday while rehabbing his knee at the Chiefs facilities. In it, he can be seen doing weighted single-leg squats, indicating substantial progress in his journey back to the field.
Rice had surgery to repair his injured LCL and hamstring tendon on Oct. 8 with the expectation that his 2024 season would be over.
Despite some initial optimism from NFL insiders Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said after the surgery that Rice's recovery timeline would track pretty closely to that of a player who tore their ACL — typically around nine months.
"It's probably the same result, though, as you'd get time-wise for an ACL," Reid told reporters. "It takes a while for that to come back."
Still, the video raises the question: Just how realistic is the chance of Rice being ready to go by the second week of February? Don't hold your breath.
At the very least, the team would need to open up a 21-day practice window for Rice, who was placed on injured reserve on Oct. 3. The latest Kansas City could make that move and still have a chance to activate Rice for Super Bowl Sunday would be this Sunday, Jan. 19.
Plus, according to former Chiefs Super Bowl champion and All-Pro offensive tackle Mitchell Schwartz on X, "Yes single leg squats means he’s 4 weeks away from being able to do everything a WR needs to do on the field and also get hit by defenders."
Even if Schwartz's informed perspective held true, Rice's return to live action is all but sure to come post-Super Bowl and later into the team's offseason program.