RasheeRice

News: 2 days agoRice and other starters are scheduled to play the first half of Saturday's preseason game against Detroit, Adam Teicher of ESPN.com reports.

Spin: The Chiefs won't necessarily use all their starters for the entire first half, but they apparently plan to put the first unit out there for far more snaps than other teams tend to be comfortable with. Rice is locked in as a starter and top target for QB Patrick Mahomes, with the biggest question at this point being whether the wideout eventually gets suspended for his off-field problems this offseason. While avoiding a suspension entirely is highly unlikely, there's some chance league punishment doesn't come down until after the season.

ESPN Fantasy Projection: Rice was arguably the one thing that went right in a 2023 Chiefs wide receiver room that seemed to get everything else wrong. He delivered 212.5 fantasy points (eighth best among all rookies) and had seven top-25 positional weekly scores. Though he did most of his damage in the short game -- his 4.9 aDOT was lowest among wide receivers -- he quickly developed into a go-to target for Patrick Mahomes. Rice was WR8 in the season's final seven weeks, despite sitting out Week 18. Rice is tricky to rank, as he could be facing a multi-game suspension due to an off-the-field incident, but he has WR2 value when active. His usage should be similar to 2023 even after the team's offseason addition of deep threats Marquise Brown and Xavier Worthy.