Penn’s Justin Watson is a ‘mini Forrest Gump’ as a Chiefs speedster receiver

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — His fifth year in the NFL, this was brand new territory for Justin Watson. It wasn’t just that his free-agent contract with the Kansas Chiefs offered no guarantees. To his eyes, this described his new status in the league.

“It wasn’t the free agency that I had thought of, dreamed of,” the Chiefs’ 26-year-old wide receiver said this week. “I got released and put on the practice squad my last week in Tampa Bay, so as soon as the season ended, I became a free agent.”

Bidding war? Not exactly.

“It was all the same contract, all the different teams, I was hearing the same thing,” Watson said.

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Minimum contract, no guarantees. Watson had to look for nuances beyond the numbers. He liked what he heard from the Chiefs.

“They said, ‘Hey, if you come here, we’re going to give you a chance,’ " Watson said. “I took their word for it and I’m so thankful that I did.”

If Watson gets on the field Sunday against the Eagles, he’ll be the first Quakers player to play in a Super Bowl, to play in the NFL championship game since before the Super Bowl era, going back to Chuck Bednarik days.

I’d written that exact sentence before, two years ago, just substituting the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the Chiefs. Except Watson lost what was essentially a coin flip on who would be the last wide receiver and was made inactive for the biggest game of his career.

“We put a ton of work into that last Super Bowl, but it was bittersweet, being so close to playing in the Super Bowl but standing on the sidelines for it,” Watson said.

As it happens, Watson was inactive for this season’s AFC championship game, except that was because of illness. He declines to get into details of it, other than to say he’s good to go Sunday, which means, expect him to really go. He actually was on the field for the third-most snaps of any Chiefs receiver this season.

“It’s special, man,” Watson said of where he stands now.

Contract aside, Watson turned heads before he ever officially practiced for the Chiefs. Like a lot of veteran QBs, Patrick Mahomes had his receivers come to him for three weeks of football work in Texas this past summer. Especially important because Kansas City had a bunch of new receivers. The guy from Tampa was hardly the big name in the bunch.

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Except Mahomes called Chiefs general manager Brett Veach after the first day of throwing to Watson.

“I was like, ‘Wait, how fast is this guy?’ " Mahomes told the Kansas City Star last May. “He was running so fast that I was late on my throws.”

“My first impression when we signed him — a wide receiver from Penn,” Chiefs wide receivers coach Joe Bleymaier said Wednesday. “And then Veach texted me, ‘Hey, we’ve had our eye on this guy for a long time. The Buccaneers don’t want to lose him, but they’ve got numbers issues.”

That fact mattered to the coach.

“Sometimes there are free agents that are just looking for a job,” Bleymaier said.

This isn’t the first time Watson has turned heads. I wrote from his pro day workout at Penn. One scout kneeling by the finish line for his 40-yard dash looked at his stopwatch. His eyes got a little wide. “What time did you have?” the guy asked the scout next to him.

All the watches were just under or just over 4.4. … That’s always translated to the field.

“You see like a Penn guy, ‘All right, Ivy League,’ you don’t know what he has,” said Chiefs backup QB Chad Henne. “But we got the training report from Tampa — all right, guy’s got some wheels. He’s got good maneuvers.”

Then Watson showed up in person. Henne saw it like Mahomes had seen it.

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“First go-round, we’re like, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to get that out there for him,’ " Henne said. “We call him, like, mini Forrest Gump.”

As in, run, Forrest, run.

“Exactly,” Henne said. “He kind of runs like it, but he’s fast.”

“I think every year, if you’re going to survive in this, you have to come with something new,” Watson said. “You have to show you’re a new player, you’ve brought something extra from the year before.”

In the offseason Watson worked with Yo Murphy, the same workout guru who trained Eagles receiver DeVonta Smith. “Best in the business,” Watson said of Murphy. Of Smith, he added, “Man, that guy works as hard and as humbly as anyone I’ve ever seen. He was there at 6 a.m. Yo had to make a new workout group because [Smith] wanted to get there first thing in the morning before the sun even came up.”

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“The big thing we did was focus on the speed of the bar,” Murphy said of Watson’s weight training. “Just velocity and power training. So like any time we had a bar in his hand, it was about how fast we could move it. Everyone knows he’s a fast guy. … if we’re talking about power, you establish power through either force or velocity. When he got to us, we assessed him. We felt like his power was built more on force.”

It’s easy to imagine how working the bar fast translates to the field.

“It was about grooving patterns,” Murphy said. “He’s very technically sound, understands strength coaching.”

Watson knew his goal going to the Chiefs and Mahomes: “Every time he threw a pass my way — on the money, off the money — I was going to make a play and come down with it.”

An obvious question is comparing the work of the two generational QB talents Watson has worked with in the NFL … best ever, and best currently. With Tom Brady, what you saw was how he was.

“You look back, you know exactly where he was going to be in the pocket,” Watson said. “You know which plays he was going to call. He was just very structured.”

Watson explained to me when he was with the Bucs that Brady was “exactly detailed” on how he wants a route to be run. From there, Watson said, “You kind of know where the ball is going to be before you turn around.”

And Mahomes?

“I think it just brings me back to playing loose,” Watson said. “At a certain point, it becomes backyard football. We have all our rules, we have our plays, we practice them a ton. But when a play breaks down and Pat starts making a play, your instincts take over. Coach [Andy] Reid says to just let your personality show. He just wants you to play free and easy.”

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Watson’s real edge, his receivers coach explained, is that he’s as fast as the speed receivers and as strong as anyone asked to go in and block a linebacker or safety. They can line him up anywhere, and do. OK, he went to Penn, so he’s going to get labeled as a smart guy, but that doesn’t have to translate to a football field. With Watson, it clearly does. This season, he had 15 receptions for 315 yards and two touchdowns. Another Forrest Gump comparison: In terms of where you’ll see him on the field, he’s everywhere.

“He learns the system, not just one position,” Henne said.

“It was really him knowing all the different roles, then be able to take the top off on one side, beat a man defender on a crossing route the next play, run a timing route, being on the same page as Pat on the next play,” Bleymaier said. “All those different things that usually take a lot of reps in practice, he could pick ‘em up and do ‘em, first time.”

Play in a Super Bowl … first time. Bleymaier knew how disappointed Watson was to be on the sideline for the AFC title game.

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“I just hurt for him,” Bleymaier said. “There was nothing really I could say. He came in, he just looked at me, said, ‘Hey, I’ve played in the NFC championship game before. I’ve never played in the Super Bowl. We’ve just got to win this game and I’ll be fine for the Super Bowl.’ "

“All right, deal.”