Brett Veach on the early excitement of watching Patrick Mahomes

Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach recently sat down with Ross Tucker’s podcast to discuss his early excitement when watching Patrick Mahomes.

Picture a team’s coaching staff and general managers rushing in their cars to go see Patrick Mahomes throw because they’re as giddy as the fans who made the trip to St. Joseph.

That’s the scene set by Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach in a new interview on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast. Veach recently sat down with Tucker to talk about myriad topics, from preparation for the upcoming draft to his own journey into football. Of course, he also wanted to talk about Patrick Mahomes.

Veach was a central figure in the Chiefs acquisition of Mahomes back in the 2017 NFL Draft, and Tucker’s interview goes over the timeline before even bringing him to K.C. However, one great anecdote came after Mahomes was already in camp. But first, a key quote from Veach about the thrill of watching Mahomes against other pro football players.

“When you’re around football your entire life and then college and then having the opportunity to work in the NFL at all levels, you see a lot of great players and sometimes you take it for granted that you’re around the best football players in the world,” said Veach. “Then all of a sudden, this kid comes in and he makes these other unbelievably gifted players look average. So when you see that, you know you’re seeing something special.”

Later on, Veach then describes how he and Matt Nagy, now the head coach of the Chicago Bears, would race to watch him play. (Nagy was the Chiefs offensive coordinator at the time.) Let’s just let Veach set the stage:

“The way he dominated his rookie season in training camp—it was almost a cult-like thing down at St. Joe, Missouri. It was like a unique phenomenon—Matt Nagy and I used to joke about this all the time—where you go to training camp and, y’know, 1 offense vs. 2 defense, 1 defense vs. 2 offense then the 3s vs. 3s play,” said Veach.

“Well, Pat was so impressive that we would literally get into our cars and run back to the dorms to watch 3s versus 3s, because the first thing we wanted to see was to see this kid run the offense on 3s versus 3s,” he continued. “You usually go back and wanna watch your starters on ‘O’ and your starters on ‘D’ to see wha you have, but he was so visually impressive that rookie training camp where we were running back to the dorms and sending each other throws … it felt like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

Of course we all know the rest of the story. Mahomes would impress enough in a regular season finale against the Denver Broncos to take over the starting role. Alex Smith would soon be traded and the team would place all their eggs in Mahomes’ basket one year after that training camp. From there, he would win the MVP and would soon hoist a Lombardi Trophy.

Not every exciting scouting find follows such a magical script, but Mahomes really was a generational talent unearthed by a team with a vision for him well in advance of drafting him. The result is a thrill ride for a fan base that has much, much more exciting football to look forward to.