The most dynamic skill-position player on the Chiefs’ roster vanished from their early-season plans Wednesday. On a team that cut a few dozen players a day earlier, Rashee Rice will sit at home not because of his talent but despite it.
The NFL suspended Rice, the team’s top wide receiver, for the initial six games of the season, a temporary eviction stemming from a March 2024 incident in which he drove 119 mph down a Dallas highway and triggered a six-car crash, according to a police account. Rice pleaded guilty to two third-degree felony counts last month. His job is on hold. Jail time awaits.
But so does an opportunity. This is a turning point — if Rice chooses to make it one.
The combination of a plea agreement and a suspension provides a finality, of sorts, to the blight hanging over the past 17 months. It’s up to him whether it provides a similar finality to the lifestyle that brought him here.
A six-game ban, the result of a settlement, is completely justified, and those feeling the urge to argue that it’s too steep — that other car-crash incidents in the NFL have produced shorter suspensions — ought to consider not what they’re arguing against, but rather what that requires them to argue for.
The presence of a video illuminated a truly horrific scene, while it darkened the relevance of league precedent.
To provide my own reminder, I flipped on the video again this week. It’s a brutal watch, and it’s all the more brutal that Rice didn’t see it himself, firsthand. Instead, he was perfectly comfortable to abandon the scene without checking to see if others had even survived.
It is not a case of bum luck that a video offered the league a chance to use Rice to set an example in a crime — street racing — that has increased its presence in both the national and local discussion.
It is precisely the opposite. Rice is the subject of extremely good fortune — a vehicle barreling 119 mph down a highway crashed into the center median and then into other cars but miraculously did not kill anyone, including himself.
In Kansas City in 2022, a 19-year-old pedestrian was hit and killed by a vehicle allegedly participating in an illegal street-racing show.
It’s not an identical incident, but Rice is fortunate it did not come with identical consequences.
His attorney, Royce West, told reporters last month that Rice understands that possibility. Rice has said a lot of the right things — or at least his attorney has said the right things on his behalf — to acknowledge his regret and his guilt.
“He’s contrite and recognizes that he could have killed someone out there,” West told reporters in Dallas. “He could’ve killed somebody. Let me be real clear about this: When he left the scene, not figuring out whether someone else was injured or dead, he recognizes that was a stupid mistake. If he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t have done that.”
I won’t presume to know what prompted Rice to wake up one morning and decide that racing a Lamborghini SUV against another vehicle down a busy highway was a good idea. But I do know that whatever prompted it — his environment, surroundings or own volition — is what has to change.
We see the talent on the field, but it’s everything behind the scenes, away from 76,000 fans inside a stadium, that requires evaluation.
This isn’t the first time Rice has been mixed up in something with negative attention. An alleged incident while he was at Southern Methodist sparked questions during the pre-draft process. His involvement was never publicly substantiated, but if you think that makes it unfair to bring up in this context, that’s the very reason it bears mentioning.
To make this point: The benefit of the doubt is gone.
That, too, will be part of the punishment — and not just looking back, but moving forward.
Chiefs head coach Andy Reid has an index card posted in his office at the team’s practice facility, with two handwritten words: “Don’t Judge.” It’s an admirable mantra that he revealed in a recent Chiefs documentary and discussed further when Star colleague Vahe Gregorian broached the subject during training camp this month.
But it’s not a national mandate. A month after his lawyer used the word “understands” more than a half-dozen times in a six-minute news conference to emphasize his client’s awareness, Rice’s understanding should include that his every move is under a public microscope that he didn’t seek but has earned.
In the wake of his guilty plea, I asked him if he’s changed, to which he replied, “Completely changed. You have to learn from things like that. I’ve learned. I’ve taken advantage of being able to learn from something like that.”
There is but one person who knows the truth behind those words — but one person who can control the truth behind those words.
There are plenty rooting for him. We should all be on that list. You, me, and of course that’s where Rice and the Chiefs’ interests most align.
From a football standpoint, a far less important standpoint, the Chiefs won’t be the same team without Rice for the initial six weeks of the 2025 season. He does some things other receivers can’t, and that’s not a prediction, but rather a statement evidenced over the last 12 games a year ago.
Because of an early-year knee injury, by the time Rice returns against Las Vegas this season, he will have played just four football games in the previous 616 days.
That’s one way to consider it. Another? He’s fortunate to be guaranteed at least one more. That’s how he ought to see it.
He’s flush with talent, and if all goes well, he could be flush with a new contract in a year, and therefore with cash that he probably doesn’t have right now. With it will come with yet more temptation.
The real-life punishments should provide a reminder of the effects of his past actions.
The future is Rice’s to change.
