FanHouse CarlosHall

Because the NFL season never ends, we present our 2009 Offseason Roadmaps for front offices to navigate through the summer.

It's a brave new world in Denver, where the Broncos will take the field without Mike Shanahan on the sideline for the first time since 1995. Josh McDaniels, their new coach, was 19 back then, and has one of the shortest resumes of any head coach in NFL history. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, but it was clear that Shanahan's system was no longer bearing fruit and the team may benefit just from the change of voice on the sideline.

Today, the Chiefs shaved their roster size down to 53.

Not a whole lot of surprises (at least, if you read my list of potential cuts before the cuts were actually made).

As i had anticipated many times over, Junior Siavii was cut from the team. While I may have joked around about his cut earlier, it is a shame that he never became quite the player he was expected to be. He still has a little time and window to turn things around, but I get the impression that his persistent knee problems will plague him for the rest of his career. Casey Printers was also cut which was a surprise; however, it really isn't, when you consider that the Chiefs pretty much had their mind set from the beginning of the preseason that Huard and Croyle would be their horses, unless Printers came in and cleaned house in training camp. Also on my original list of cuts, I predicted that Johnathan Ingram and Carlos Hall would likely not make the final 53-man roster. Ingram was not a surprise cut because he wasn't that good in the first place. Carlos Hall was a slight surprise, but he's been hurt way too often to justify keeping him on the roster.

When you scrape deeper down the surface, a few of the Chiefs' roster decisions were surprising. The Chiefs decided to keep four halfbacks on their roster (Larry Johnson, Michael Bennett, Dee Brown, and Derrick Ross). Keeping four halfbacks on the roster was one surprise; keeping only one fullback on the roster was the other surprise (J.R. Niklos was cut, very surprisingly). The other surprise, as I had briefly alluded to in my previous post, was that the Chiefs kept Chris Hannon as the fifth receiver on their roster. It was a roll of the dice as to whether he would win a roster spot over Nate Curry and the dice happened to roll in Hannon's favor. Hannon is a pretty lackluster receiver to keep on the roster and you can't help but wonder if the Chiefs will make an extra play for Branch or Rogers.

Chris Johnson, Jeremy Parquet, McKenzi Smith, and Shane Burton were four players cut largely due to playing a position that was simply too deep. Apart from that, most players that were expected to be cut were cut.