Kansas City Chiefs: The 5 biggest moves of Brett Veach’s first year as general manager
By Matt Conner
4. Sign Sammy Watkins
Brett Veach has a lot of his reputation riding on this one.
The Chiefs GM has already taken plenty of hits for signing Sammy Watkins to such a lucrative contract in free agency when the price tag certainly seems quite steep given his history. This offseason, Watkins took the Chiefs for $48 million over just 3 seasons, putting him on par with the highest paid wideouts in football. Unfortunately, his production to date includes only a single 1,000-yard season to his name and even that was in 2015.
Fortunately contracts are not about rewarding players for what they’ve done but are based on projections of what they will do. Veach has very high hopes for Watkins, not only for his abilities on the field but how he might free others up as well. Of course, Watkins would not have signed for $16M per season if he wasn’t able to bring in pretty much anything thrown his way.
Given an offense focused on maximizing Watkins’ talents, he might enjoy a banner year in 2018 even as he has to share the wealth in terms of targets. Last year the Chiefs offense stalled when a player like Travis Kelce was forced to miss time with injury (concussion in the playoff loss to the Titans). With Watkins in the fold, there are more offensive threats than what most defenses can account for.