PFF’s 20-year celebration produces an all-time Chiefs roster, built from the data era that began in 2006

Pro Football Focus has taken a look at the Kansas City Chiefs through the lens of its own 20-year grading history, assembling an all-Chiefs team meant to represent the best players from the franchise’s last two decades. The exercise, detailed by Yahoo Sports on June 23, is part of PFF’s broader anniversary programming built around how it has evaluated NFL performance since 2006, the first year the company began tracking and grading players and teams in its current form.

The core premise is straightforward: PFF is selecting standout performers across positional groups and building an “All-Star team” concept for each franchise, with the Chiefs featured as one of the editions tied to the 2006-to-present data window. For Kansas City, that span covers the era when the Chiefs went from being a competitive playoff team to a true centerpiece of the league’s modern offenses, but the project is not framed as a season-by-season review. Instead, it is an all-time roster concept based on PFF’s evaluation of who performed best during that 20-year period.

PFF’s methodology matters because it is trying to compare players across different offensive schemes, defensive eras, and rule-adaptation cycles. Unlike an awards list tied to a single year, an all-time team built from a long grading window asks voters to balance peaks, consistency, and longevity, while also accounting for how a player’s impact may show up in PFF grades beyond simple box-score results.

For Chiefs fans, the appeal of the exercise is also cultural. Kansas City has been defined in the post-2006 NFL by quarterback-centered offenses, creative route concepts, and a roster construction approach that has repeatedly refreshed talent while maintaining a high floor. Even without a traditional “best of 20 years” trophy, the roster-building project functions as a scoreboard for the franchise’s identity during the same time frame PFF began its NFL grading.

There is a caveat, though, that sports readers should keep in mind. PFF All-Star teams are editorial products, not official league recognitions, and they reflect the company’s grading system and the criteria that go into building a full roster. That means there will be inevitable debate about borderline choices, especially for positions where contributions can be difficult to measure with any single statistic, such as interior coverage, run fits, and quarterback situational decision-making.

What to watch next is how PFF presents the final roster and what balance it strikes across the depth chart. If the All-Star team leans toward longevity, it could emphasize players with sustained high-level grading; if it emphasizes peak seasons, it may reflect the franchise’s most dominant stretches. Either way, the Chiefs edition is likely to be a reference point for fans when they compare their own “best players” lists to a data-driven construction from the last 20 years.

In the broader league context, the Chiefs installment is also a way to see how PFF’s 2006-to-present grading era captures franchise evolution. Teams that rose earlier might look different than franchises that peaked later, and the All-Star format can make that contrast visible in a single roster image.