It’s hard to imagine a more isolating spot for a young player: watching your team roll through an undefeated start to the season week after week while you remain glued to the sidelines, unable to take a single snap. Just a day before the Kansas City Chiefs placed left tackle Josh Simmons on the injured reserve, that mounting physical and mental frustration finally boiled over behind closed doors.

According to ESPN reporters Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo, Simmons was asked to leave an offensive meeting ahead of the team’s Week 7 matchup against the Seattle Seahawks after a tense clash with the coaching staff. Simmons had his feet propped up in the room, prompting head coach Andy Reid to step in and instruct the 23-year-old to put them down.

Simmons pushed back against his coach, saying his back and hips were aching and he needed to sit normally. When Reid told him to seek proper treatment from the trainers if he was in pain, the situation stalled until franchise quarterback Patrick Mahomes had to intervene.

“The exchange continued and disrupted the meeting, sources said, until Mahomes echoed Reid’s sentiment for Simmons to leave the room and go get treatment,” wrote Rapoport and Garafolo. “A perturbed Simmons left the room but did not leave the building. Later in the day, Simmons apologized to Reid and team leadership by saying he could have handled the situation better.

“Simmons missed practice Wednesday, with the Chiefs’ injury report listing the reason as ‘back/not injury related-personal.’ A day later, he was placed on injured reserve solely because of the bulging, herniated disk in his lower back.”

Now, this initial disagreement became public knowledge remarkably fast, prompting local analysts to question the optics of how meeting room details found their way to the outside world.

“A Chiefs meeting never gets leaked to the media unless a point needs to be made,” Fox 4 Kansas City’s sports anchor Harold R. Kuntz wrote on X. “This screams the club saying something along the lines of ‘It’s on him .. not us, we did our best.”

This public airing of grievances highlighted the lost season for the former first-round pick even more. He’s yet to play a snap in 2026 due to stubborn back issues that first surfaced back in training camp. During practices at St. Joseph, Missouri, Simmons had informed VP of sports medicine and performance Rick Burkholder about the consistent calf discomfort and an inability to properly bear weight on one leg – the same leg that landed him on a surgery table for a torn patellar tendon back in 2024 while he was with Ohio State.

The initial alarm led to an immediate MRI, with Burkholder later detailing to reporters the medical reality the O-Line room was faced with.

“We obtained an MRI in St. Joe that confirmed that he had a bulging, herniated disc in his lumbar spine,” said Burkholder. “That disc problem was higher up than what we normally see in our offensive linemen, which complicated the case. We recommended a second opinion, as we always do with all of our injured guys and, through his agent and Josh, they selected a spine specialist in California that we have used previously and is really well-known in the NFL.

“He went there and was evaluated, and the recommendation was to do rehabilitation — not surgery — with the intent that we would do an MRI in the near future to see what that disc looked like. Josh continued to progress, and the repeat MRI a few weeks later showed that the disc improved, so no surgery was recommended and rehab would continue.”

That conservative rehab path initially showed promise. But when Simmons tried to ramp up his workload following the Chiefs’ Week 5 bye, his body hit a physical wall, forcing the collective decision that an IR designation was the safest course for now.

For a player picked 32nd overall in the 2025 draft, health setbacks and friction have marred his short professional tenure. Between missing time during his rookie year for personal family reasons and a wrist fracture that required an IR stint, Josh Simmons has only suited up for 8 out of 22 possible games so far. Now forced to wait until at least Week 11 against the Arizona Cardinals, he faces another grueling stretch of rehab to salvage a career struggling to get off the ground.