Yahoo Sports’ mock draft 8.0 sends a safety to the Chiefs

In their latest mock, Nate Tice and Charles McDonald pick Georgia’s Malaki Starks for Kansas City.

On Thursday, Yahoo Sports’ Nate Tice and Charles McDonald published their mock draft 8.0 for 2025, in which they sent a safety to the Kansas City Chiefs with the 31st pick of the first round.

31. Kansas City Chiefs: S Malaki Starks, Georgia

Steal alert? Starks is one of the best defenders in the draft, but finds himself at the bottom of the first round where he would fit seamlessly into a defense run by Steve Spagnuolo. Starks can cover, play in the box and give aggressive, productive play while attacking offenses. He would be going lower than many people have him projected, which works out well for the Chiefs in this scenario.

So far, we’ve collected more than 100 mock drafts. This is the first time we’ve seen Starks go to the Chiefs with the 31st pick. In the previous 10 mocks we’ve recorded, Starks was available to Kansas City only once. In three of the mocks, he was taken by the Miami Dolphins at 13 — and in three others, he went to the Baltimore Ravens at 27. So Tice and McDonald are probably right: the former Georgia safety would be a steal at 31.

I’d also agree that Spagnuolo would love having a versatile player like Starks take over the role previously filled by Tyrann Mathieu and Justin Reid — and Kansas City probably has him on its board with a first-round grade. So if the opening round really plays out this way (among the players we’ve typically seen mocked to the Chiefs, Mississippi DT Walter Nolen and Tennessee EDGE James Pearce Jr. are the only ones still available at the 31st pick), Kansas City’s representative would probably make a beeline to the podium.

So yes… this is probably a pipe dream. But in the NFL Draft, stranger things have been known to happen.

When the Chiefs go on the clock, it’s looking more and more like the team will be seeking the best player available — or that it has done a superb job of masking its intentions. In the 30 mock drafts we’ve collected in the last two weeks, Kansas City has taken an offensive tackle most frequently (with Ohio State’s Josh Simmons leading the pack by an ever-widening margin), followed by a defensive tackle. But after that, the positional percentages are drawing closer together.