Getty Anthony Hitchens was recently released by the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Kansas City Chiefs released veteran linebacker Anthony Hitchens in a cap-saving move, the team announced on February 22.
Considering his connections to the new Chicago Bears regime, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Hitchens land in the Windy City. The veteran defender was due a base salary of $7.8 million in 2022 after singing a five-year, $45 million deal with the Chiefs in 2018, and his release wasn’t much of a surprise.
Signing Hitchens won’t impact compensatory picks at all, and he’ll likely get a good deal of attention on the market, but he has a history with both new Bears general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus, so a reunion would make sense.
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Hitchens Spent 4 Seasons With Poles & 4 With Eberflus
Hitchens, who turns 30 in June, spent the previous four seasons with Poles in Kansas City, and he also worked with Eberflus in Dallas for the first four years of his career. He and Eberflus worked together directly in that span, as the current Bears coach served as linebackers coach at the time.
Eberflus and new Bears defensive coordinator Alan Williams will be switching Chicago’s defensive scheme from a 3-4 to a 4-3, which Hitchens has experience with. The Bears will also likely be parting ways with Danny Trevathan, and could very well move Roquan Smith around in the 4-3. If Chicago is looking to mix things up on defense, Hitchens would make sense as a middle or left-side linebacker.
“Certainly worth keeping an eye on,” Brad Spielberger of PFF tweeted about the possibility of Hitchens reuniting with Poles and Eberflus.
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Hitchens Has Been Reliable Veteran LB for 8 Seasons
GettyAnthony Hitchens helped the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV.
Hitchens has started 59 games over his last four seasons in Kansas City, and he played in 60 during his time with the Cowboys, starting 48. He was a core member of the Chiefs’ Super Bowl-winning unit in 2020, and he’s coming off a 2021 campaign that saw him amass 80 total tackles (four for loss), an interception, two passes defensed and two QB hits. He played 597 snaps last season, per PFF, and he has played at least 60% of Kansas City’s defensive snaps in each of the last four years.
A fourth-round pick for the Cowboys (119th overall) in 2014, Hitchens doesn’t have any red flags in his injury history, and it shouldn’t take long for him to find a new home. Whether he lands in Chicago will likely depend on what other teams offer him in addition to whether or not Eberflus wants a reunion. The Bears have just under $27 million in cap space currently, per Spotrac, so if they want to bring him on, they may be letting a player or two go to make room.
Based on his comments in the past, Hitchens enjoyed playing under Eberflus.
“We do a lot of things where we all play off each other,” Hitchens told the Cowboys official website about Eberflus’ defense back in 2015. “I feel like in our scheme you can do that, but there are not a lot of schemes you can do that. Our coaches do a good job here of ‘trans-coaching’ us, and making us study other positions early on.”
The ball is in the court of Poles and Eberflus now. We’ll see what they do with it.
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