Chris Oladokun – The Kansas City Chiefs QB Nobody Knew Until They Needed Him
December 21, 2025. Gardner Minshew takes a hit against the Tennessee Titans, grabs his knee, and doesn’t get up. Patrick Mahomes had already been carted off the week before with a torn ACL. Andy Reid looks down his sideline and finds Chris Oladokun – a 28-year-old who had thrown exactly one NFL pass in three years on the roster. That’s how most people learned his name.
Tampa Kid, Three Schools, One Long Bet on Himself
Oladokun grew up in Tampa, Florida, and started his high school career at Braulio Alonso, where he spent his sophomore and junior seasons throwing for 3,746 yards and 35 touchdowns. Before his senior year, he transferred to Sickles High School after a falling-out with the Alonso coaching staff. At Sickles he threw for 1,390 yards and 15 touchdowns in nine games with only three interceptions – cleaner numbers, shorter sample. He was selected for the Blue-Grey Football All-American Bowl and rated a three-star recruit by Scout, 247Sports, and Rivals. Nebraska, Iowa State, and Temple all offered. He chose South Florida, 12 miles from where he went to high school.
At USF, he redshirted, appeared in six games as a redshirt freshman, then started three times as a sophomore – completing 22 of 44 passes for 285 yards, three touchdowns, one interception. Not enough to keep the job. He transferred to Samford for the 2019 season and that’s where the dual-threat identity actually showed up on a stat sheet: 2,064 passing yards, 18 touchdowns, 493 rushing yards, 8 rushing touchdowns in 12 games. The Bulldogs used him in all 12. He was named the SoCon Offensive Player of the Month for September and won Offensive Player of the Week three times, including a six-touchdown game at Tennessee Tech where he tied school records for TD passes and total touchdowns in a single game. COVID cut 2020 short and he started only one game. He took a graduate transfer to South Dakota State.
The SDSU season is the one NFL scouts actually watched. He threw for 3,164 yards, 25 touchdowns, and only 7 interceptions on a 62% completion rate. The Jackrabbits went 11-4 and reached the FCS semifinals before losing to Montana State. He earned Missouri Valley Football Conference Honorable Mention and made the MVFC All-Newcomer Team. After the season he said: “Everything came to fruition. All the hard work that I’ve put in this last five, six years all came out this year. It’s something that I always knew I could do.” The NFL draft was two months away.
Round 7, Pick 241 – and Out the Door in Six Months
Pittsburgh selected him 241st overall in the 2022 draft. Seventh-round quarterbacks almost never make active rosters, and Oladokun’s situation was particularly thin: the Steelers had just taken Kenny Pickett in the first round. Pickett was competing for a starting job. Oladokun was competing for survival. He was released August 23, 2022, before a regular-season snap.
Kansas City signed him to their practice squad eight days later. What followed was three years of the most invisible kind of professional football career – repeated waiving, re-signing, and elevation cycles that showed up in transaction logs and nowhere else. He was waived in August 2023, re-signed to the practice squad the same day. Elevated for the Week 18 game against the Chargers in January 2024 and was active – his first time being active for an NFL game – but did not play a single snap. Waived again in August 2024. Signed back to the practice squad in October. Through all of it, he earned two Super Bowl rings: one when Kansas City beat Philadelphia in Super Bowl LVII, one when they beat San Francisco in Super Bowl LVIII. He did not play in either game.
The Three Games That Finally Happened
Week 16, Tennessee Titans. Mahomes was already out. Minshew started and went down in the second quarter with a serious knee injury. Oladokun came in and completed 11 of 16 passes for 111 yards. No touchdowns, no interceptions. His first career completion went to Travis Kelce – 6 yards over the middle. Kansas City lost 26-9, but the performance was functional enough that Reid confirmed Oladokun would start the Christmas Day game.
Week 17, Denver Broncos, Thursday Night Football, Christmas. He completed 13 of 22 passes for 66 yards, threw one touchdown, fumbled once but recovered. Chiefs lost 20-13. The 66 passing yards in a starting assignment is genuinely hard to spin – Andy Reid’s offense runs on rhythm passing and Oladokun’s average depth of target was short all night. But he didn’t turn the ball over through the air and Kansas City was in the game until the fourth quarter.
Week 18, Las Vegas Raiders. This one went badly. He completed 11 of 17 passes for 58 yards, no touchdowns, and lost two fumbles in the second quarter. Reid benched him at halftime. The Chiefs lost 14-12. A two-game audition that ended with him sitting on the sideline in the final regular-season game of his career’s only starting stretch. Kansas City finished the season without a functional quarterback and without a playoff spot.
What the Scouting Reports Said – and What the Games Confirmed
NFLDraftBuzz’s pre-draft profile from 2022 identified his arm as “good, not elite” – capable of making all NFL throws but prone to sailing passes to the sideline. The three starts confirmed that. His intermediate accuracy was fine; the deep ball showed up occasionally (a 28-yard completion to Xavier Worthy in Week 16, a connection with Marquise Brown for 18 yards). His mobility was real – he scrambled for 26 yards against Arizona in a preseason game and consistently bought time in the pocket throughout his first start against Tennessee.
The fumbling is harder to explain away. Two lost fumbles in Week 18 came on plays where he held the ball too long under pressure – which maps to the pre-draft note about “trusting his arm too much on late throws when off balance.” He recovered one fumble against Denver. He lost two in Las Vegas. Four fumbles in three games as a starter is the number that NFL teams will look at when deciding whether to sign him as a backup.
His arm strength is average for the position. At 6-1, 213 pounds, he isn’t undersized but he isn’t a big-bodied pocket passer either. The back-foot inaccuracy that scouts flagged in college showed up in Week 18 specifically. His best throws across all three games came when he had a clean pocket and could step into the ball – the Isiah Pacheco 31-yard gain in Week 16, where he climbed the pocket and delivered on time, was the closest he looked to an NFL starter.
The Numbers, Flat
Career regular-season stats through the 2025 season: 4 games played, 35 completions on 55 attempts (63.6%), 235 passing yards, 1 touchdown, 0 interceptions, 3 lost fumbles. His passer rating across those appearances was low – the yardage totals reflect Kansas City’s conservative play-calling more than his own limitations, though the fumbles are his. He rushed 4 times for 18 yards. He never threw an interception in live regular-season action, which is one of the cleaner things on the sheet.
College career totals across Samford and South Dakota State – the two seasons where he was a full-time starter: 5,228 passing yards, 43 touchdowns, 14 interceptions, over 600 rushing yards. The production was FCS-level, but it was consistent and efficient. His 62% completion rate at SDSU on a team that won 11 games is not a small-conference mirage – South Dakota State was the second-ranked FCS program that year and lost in the semifinals on the road.
Where He Stands in 2026
Oladokun signed a reserve/future contract with Kansas City in February 2025 and remained under contract entering 2026. Then the Chiefs traded for Justin Fields from the Jets in March. That move effectively ends any realistic path to Oladokun playing meaningful snaps for Kansas City. Fields will back up Patrick Mahomes – if Mahomes returns healthy from his ACL tear. Oladokun is third on a depth chart that matters only in the event of two quarterback injuries, which is exactly the scenario that gave him his three starts in 2025.
The honest career question isn’t whether he’ll start – he won’t, not in Kansas City. It’s whether some team building depth at the position gives him a practice squad spot based on his December 2025 tape. Most seventh-round quarterbacks from 2022 are out of football. Oladokun is still in the building, still on the roster of a franchise that has won three Super Bowls in four years, and still has 235 career passing yards and a Christmas Day start on his resume. That’s a strange combination of almost nothing and more than almost anyone.
The Person Behind the Transaction Log
He was born September 3, 1997. His father Henry played basketball at Howard University. He has a younger brother, Jordan, who played defensive back at Gaither High School in Tampa, and a younger sister, Kayla. He majored in mass communications at USF. He’s on Instagram at @chris_oladokun, where his bio reads: “Kansas City Chiefs QB | Tampa.” Thirty-one thousand followers as of early 2026 – most of them acquired in the two weeks after Mahomes went down.
Comments