Former Chiefs and Falcons Lineman Allen Bailey Dies at 37

Allen Bailey, a defensive lineman who played ten seasons in the NFL, has died at 37. He spent eight of those seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs, the team that drafted him out of Miami in 2011, and his final two with the Atlanta Falcons. His family believes he died of natural causes at his Florida home on Tuesday. No official cause of death has been released, and this article reports the family’s account at exactly that strength and nothing further.

What happened to Allen Bailey?

His brother, Alford Bailey Jr., told TMZ that Bailey’s wife, Lauren, found him dead inside their Florida home on Tuesday, October 20, and that the family believes he died of natural causes, the New York Post reports. No authority has announced a cause, and Yardbarker states that plainly: the natural causes account is the family’s belief, not a finding. That distinction is the whole of what is known about his death, and it is why the coverage of it here stays short. What followed the news, through Wednesday, was the reaction of the two franchises he played for and the teammates who lined up next to him.

What did the Chiefs and Andy Reid say?

Kansas City marked the loss in the club’s own words first. “Allen Bailey was an excellent teammate, generous man, and kind soul,” the Chiefs said in a statement. “We’re deeply saddened to hear of his passing, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.” His head coach went further in person. “Our hearts go out to his family. Prayers are with them,” Andy Reid told reporters on Wednesday, the Palm Beach Post reports. “Way too young, obviously. One of my favorite players. Great kid. Just sorry to see that happened to him.” Reid is not a coach who distributes that kind of praise loosely across a long career of rosters, a standing reflected in the company he keeps on this site’s list of the highest-paid NFL coaches. Atlanta, where Bailey played his final two seasons, also paid tribute as the news spread on Wednesday.

Who was Bailey as a player?

A third-round pick, 86th overall, in the 2011 draft, who worked his way from rotation piece to starter on a defensive front that helped turn Kansas City into an AFC power. Across 133 games and 70 starts he recorded 248 tackles, 40 tackles for loss, 40 quarterback hits, 22 sacks and seven fumble recoveries, talkSPORT’s career line records. Teammates called the 6-foot-3, 288-pound lineman “Hulk.” He broke into the starting lineup in 2014, posted five sacks in 12 starts, and was rewarded with a four-year, 25 million dollar extension. His best season came last in Kansas City, a career high six sacks in 2018, alongside Chris Jones, Justin Houston and Tamba Hali on a front the Palm Beach Post describes as creating consistent havoc. Before the NFL he was a two-time All-ACC selection at Miami, where he recorded 107 tackles and 19 sacks in 50 games, including 3.5 sacks in a single game against North Carolina in 2010.

Why does the timing of his Kansas City exit still sting?

Because he missed the ring by one season. Bailey’s final two years at Arrowhead, 2017 and 2018, were Patrick Mahomes’s first two seasons in the league, and Mahomes won the MVP award in the second of them, a run through the record this site keeps in its list of NFL MVP winners. Bailey left for Atlanta in 2019. The season that followed, the Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV, the title that started the run recorded in the Super Bowl wins by team list. The defensive front he had been part of for eight years won it the year after he left. Nothing about his Atlanta finish diminishes the Kansas City body of work: 31 games across two seasons before the Falcons released him in 2021 in a salary cap reshaping. But the one-season gap between his departure and the parade is the detail his old teammates’ tributes kept circling back to, because it is the detail that makes a solid career read like an almost story.

What did he build away from the field, and who remembered him first?

The foundation that carried his name in the place he came from. Bailey was a native of Sapelo Island, Georgia, who starred at McIntosh County Academy before Miami recruited him, one of the more distinctive routes into big college football. In 2016 he founded the Allen Bailey Foundation, which supports student athletes and families in his home region through free football camps, scholarships, backpack drives and community events. The tributes on Wednesday came from both of his football homes. Dwayne Bowe, his Chiefs teammate for four seasons, called him one of the best teammates he had been around and asked for prayers for his family. Jeff Allen, the former Chiefs offensive lineman, wrote: “Lost a teammate, a friend, a brother. God needed another angel. Rest easy, my brother.” Colin McCarthy, his Miami teammate who went on to play for the Titans, posted from their college days, and Hurricanes teammates Travis Benjamin and Jimmy Graham added their own. A week that has already given the league a very different kind of defensive story, in the two spitting ejections and suspensions from the Bills-Raiders game, ends its Wednesday with a simpler one: a 37-year-old former starter, remembered first as a teammate.