The Kansas City Chiefs picked the right time to have a ton of available cash for a trade deadline which could have a lot of willing sellers.
It’s impossible for Brett Veach to have planned things this way (at least, we think so), but the Kansas City Chiefs could not have timed things any better.
This year in the NFL, parity seems like a lost cause. Some teams are obviously tanking. Other teams have been forced to tank. Other teams looked like they tried, but it was pretty easy to tell that tanking would likely be in their future. Put it all together and you have a very wide berth between the haves and the have-nots in the National Football League.
Consider the AFC East by itself: the New England Patriots and Buffalo Bills are undefeated. The New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins, meanwhile, are winless. There’s no parity here. Two teams are already up three games on their rivals—after only three games. The Chiefs own a two-game lead in the West, and the Cowboys are up two in the NFC East.
Check out the current list of winless teams in the NFL:
- Arizona Cardinals
- Cincinnati Bengals
- Denver Broncos
- Miami Dolphins
- New York Jets
- Pittsburgh Steelers
- Washington Redskins
This doesn’t include one-win teams like the Oakland Raiders, Carolina Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or New York Giants—all of whom could easily cash it in at some point and look toward the future.
All of this is important because of one primary date coming up: the NFL’s trade deadline.
Every team has until Tuesday, October 29 at 4:00 p.m. ET to submit their final trades of the year. That’s slightly over a month away. That means that several teams in just a few weeks are going to have play a game of chicken and either move ahead despite the evidence or cash it in and coast for two more months as they answer the question of whether or not they can compete in 2019.
Enter Brett Veach, an aggressive wheeler-dealer who has already reportedly been “in” on potential trades for Jalen Ramsey and Minkah Fitzpatrick. Veach has done something wonderful which is to give the Chiefs more available salary cap room than they’ve had in-season in years. Per Over the Cap, the Chiefs have a shade under $22 million, which gives them plenty of space to take on an unwanted contract or two from teams who decide to give it a go next year.
At this point it’s only three games into the season, which means some of these teams could start winning. The Steelers’ trade for Fitzpatrick shows they’re not going down without a fight despite the loss of Ben Roethlisberger to injury. The Broncos have enough vets left from their Super Bowl days to keep pushing in the present. The Panthers and/or Bucs could also decide the same.
However it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see as many as 10 teams ready to roll over at the deadline for the ability to grab whatever future help they can get. Veach won’t be the only shopper, of course, but he might have one of the deepest pockets of anyone perusing the available goods. Given the amount of expected supply, Veach might have his pick of a few good deals just five weeks from now.