Despite Penalties, KC Chiefs Are Fully Confident in L’Jarius Sneed

Kansas City believes in the unique style of its young cornerback and wants him to keep embracing challenges as he has throughout his career.

The Kansas City Chiefs' defense is one of the NFL's leading success stories this season. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo's group is a consensus top-five unit in the sport right now, thriving due to a multitude of factors. One of them is a young, hungry and athletic secondary. Those adjectives couldn't fit L'Jarius Sneed much better.

Sneed, now in his fourth season in Kansas City, is playing his best football in the final year of his rookie contract. In 2023, he's been given the proverbial green light to travel and get physical with opposing No. 1 wide receivers such as Justin Jefferson and Tyreek Hill. Spagnuolo and defensive backs coach Dave Merritt trust Sneed to get the job, done which is exactly what's happened through nine games. It's come at an occasional cost, though.

Entering Week 11, Sneed is tied for second in the NFL in accrued penalties with eight. On the defensive side of the ball, that mark is shared with Detroit Lions defensive back Jerry Jacobs. Technically speaking, Sneed has been flagged 12 times, but four were declined. The split for his eight accepted penalties is three for holding, three for pass interference, one for illegal contact and one for illegal use of hands. On Friday, Spagnuolo chalked some of them up to simply the style of football Sneed plays. 

"There's some 'cost of doing business' penalties when you're a press team, you're doing against a really good wideout and you're trying to be aggressive and try to take that guy out of the game," Spagnuolo said. "Now, LJ will tell you he knows he can be a little bit better. Sometimes the hands get a little bit too high — we get hands to the face — or we get a little grabby. We can avoid those. But I really don't want LJ to become less aggressive, so he'll probably maintain that and hopefully not get as many penalties." 

The Chiefs' endorsement of press-man coverage is something that Merritt has mentioned this season. Now having the right combination of personnel and experience to unleash it more often, Kansas City gets up close and personal with many of its opposing wideouts. Not only does that send a strong message by establishing a tone early, but it disrupts a receiver's timing and doesn't allow for free or clean releases off the line of scrimmage. Players like Jefferson and Hill don't typically receive that treatment to that degree or effectiveness. Sneed did a masterful job containing them.

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Also speaking on Friday, Merritt said that Sneed simply needs to hone in on "lowering his target" at the beginning of plays. When he's "in-phase," however, is when a lot of his penalties are coming (according to one of his top coaches) due to being too grabby. Merritt adds that the Chiefs are working with Sneed to trust that his natural ability "is good enough to run the route" alongside his assignment as they sink their hips. That, in turn, leads to fewer penalties in theory but still allows Sneed to stay close to the opposition.

Something many tend to forget is that Sneed came into the NFL as more of a safety. He split time as a hybrid piece in college at Louisiana Tech but by the time his college career wrapped up, most believed he'd end up at the safety position. Because of his impressive pre-draft athletic testing and high-quality football acumen, though, the Chiefs decided to transition him to a traditional cornerback role. As Merritt and Spagnuolo fine-tune some things now that Sneed's in his fourth season, part of Merritt's unwavering confidence in his defensive back is that he's always viewed him as a special player. 

"You could see it," Merritt said. "He's a COVID baby. I say that because I didn't meet him until we got to training camp. So I saw him on video and I [tell] him all the time 'You're a COVID baby, so we didn't have a chance to work with you in the offseason.' From day one when you saw this young man's explosiveness in and out of breaks and you didn't know that he had the balance that you can see within his football nature, but he has heavy hands and he's a competitor. 

"Even in our jog-through, there's a young man by the name of Anthony that runs routes for us, and Sneed would like for Anthony to release full speed every time. And we're in jog-through. That's not Sneed's M.O. to just walk through. He wants work every day, so you could see that right away that he was going to be pretty good." 

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