CLEVELAND -- Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid is a football fan at his core, and when preparing practice and game plans late into the evening, he is apt to turn on a television set and have a football game on in the background.
And two years ago, Reid turned on University of Toledo games where former Willoughby South Rebels standout Kareem Hunt was racking up yards and touchdowns at an impressive enough rate for the Chiefs to take a chance on him with a third-round pick in the 2017 NFL Draft.
“I told people this, I watched all of those Thursday night games of him,” Reid said. “You sit here, you are doing work and you put on the MAC and they are grinding it out there. Toledo was on there quite often. I go, ‘Man, who is that guy? What a heck of a back he is.’
“Next thing I know, I am coaching him. He is doing the same things that he did there that he is doing with us. He comes to work every day with a purpose, loves to play the game, smart, tough. He is a pleasure to coach.”
Hunt has not disappointed in his time with the Chiefs, where he has become one of the best dual-threat backs in all of the National Football League.
Hunt rushed for 592 yards and five touchdowns on 134 carries, an average of 4.4 yards per attempt, over the first eight games of the season. Hunt is on pace to set a new personal best for rushing touchdowns in a season.
Additionally, Hunt has turned 20 catches into 262 yards and five touchdowns, which rank him second on the Chiefs in receiving scores, behind only wide receiver Tyreke Hill. Hunt averages 13.1 yards per reception.
“Both in the passing game and in the running game, you have to respect him running the football,” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “He is someone that breaks a ton of tackles. He gets a lot of extra yards. At the same time, he can catch the ball out of the backfield. You have to make sure that you can account for him. I feel like he is the most pivotal guy in our offense.
“He is a special player. He is able to do a lot of things. He can block. He can run the ball as good as anyone. He can catch the ball out of the backfield as good as anyone. It makes my job a lot easier knowing that at any moment I could just hand the ball off to him and it could be a touchdown.”
Not bad for a player originally slated to be a complementary back during his rookie season, only to be inserted into the lineup because of an injury and led the league with 1,327 yards on 272 carries during the 2017 season.
Along with leading the league in rushing, Hunt ranked second among all running backs with 10-yard carries (35) and third in scrimmage yards (1,782).
“He is a really good football player,” Browns interim coach/defensive coordinator Gregg Williams said. “He does some Marshawn Lynch things when Marshawn was in Buffalo really young in his career. We see some of the similarities there on how not only is he a good space player and I think he has improved each year that he has been in the league with Andy.
“Those guys -- he has improved his pass part of the game, too -- but his run awareness and his open-field type stuff, he is a powerful young man. We are going to have to do a good job tackling him in space. We dedicated quite a bit of what we are doing in practice to those areas that we see him being elite right now. I can say the word elite. He is a very good tackle breaker.”
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