Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Xavier Worthy made an exciting debut this past weekend, throwing for two touchdowns in just three touches. But not everyone around the NFL was so impressed.
Ahead of Sunday’s game between the Chiefs and the Cincinnati Bengals, Bengals defensive back Cam Taylor-Britt didn’t seem worried about facing Worthy. The third-year cornerback told reporters on Thursday that Worthy’s most important attribute is his speed, rather than his creativity.
“Speed. That’s about it,” Taylor-Britt said of what Worthy brings to the Chiefs’ offense, via WCPO’s Caleb Noe. “He can run straight. He can run jet sweeps and just run straight. He can’t do much else, so that’s about it.”
Taylor-Britt also mentioned Worthy’s size: At 6-foot-1 and 165 pounds, Worthy is relatively small for a receiver.
“He only weighs a hundred pounds, so if you grab him, you’re going to stop his speed,” Taylor-Britt said of his plan to slow Worthy down. “So just grab him.”
Worthy, the 28th overall pick out of Texas, ran a record-breaking 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine, clocking a time of 4.21 seconds. The impressive speed quickly changed the conversation around Worthy leading up to the draft, before he was ultimately picked up by the defending champion Chiefs.
Worthy likely won’t take Taylor-Britt’s comments personally: He had prepared himself to limit the 21-year-old receiver solely to his speed after setting his 40-yard dash record.
“I feel like if I had run a 4.3 before the combine, they would have been like, ‘Oh, he’s a route runner’ — but now that I’m running a 4.2, it’s like, ‘He’s just fast,'” Worthy told Yahoo Sports in April, a month after the Combine. “My film is there. I’ve run every route in the route tree. I’ve been open on every route, been successful on every route. The film doesn’t lie.”
Worthy had a touchdown on his first-ever NFL touch on Sunday, and got his second later in the game. Taylor-Britt had four solo tackles in Week 1.
The Chiefs and Bengals meet in the second series of games on Sunday, an early showdown between two AFC heavyweights.
