Kansas City Chiefs should have advantage with uninterrupted 2020 NFL Draft

Given that the NFL insists on moving forward with the draft as scheduled, a team like the Kansas City Chiefs should enjoy a nice advantage.

On Thursday evening, the National Football League sent out a memo to each of its 32 teams indicating that the “show will go on,” as they say, regarding the 2020 NFL Draft. Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the inability to gather in any large groups, the draft will still be held on April 23-25 in ways that will allow teams to conduct the business needed (the selection of players) even if the rest of the pageantry will largely be missing.

This is good news if you are a team known for organizational stability and front office acumen, like the Kansas City Chiefs.

At this point, the complaints from general managers were all about their inability to know everything they want to know about a particular player. That’s an understandable frustration in a season like this. Dozens of pro days were cancelled. On-site interviews were nixed. A team’s ability to really get a feel for players in whom they could be investing millions has been seriously inhibited. That’s bad for business.

That said, it’s maddening across the board but particularly harmful for teams trying to find their footing under new leadership. The typical on-boarding process for a new general manager is to maintain some of the former regimes scouts through draft season. Scouting is a year-round business, so imagine a new GM trying to install a new staff of personnel heads and area scouts with only three months to get ready for a draft class.

A GM’s first draft can often be his worst draft because the set-up just isn’t there in year one. A general manager is typically not even working with the full staff that he wants until year two, when there’s been 12 full months with his trusted team of experts. It’s hard to tell what was behind even Brett Veach’s first draft class, but the difference in the 2018 and 2019 classes are significant—and it’s not as if the Chiefs turned over their entire front office, just the GM.

At this point, a team with organizational stability will have very clear communication at work between the front office and coaching staff. Each scout will have a very intimate knowledge of exactly the sorts of players the Chiefs want and need at each position. The execs viewing the tape can look with a coach’s eye because the organizational structure has been together for so long and the trust between Veach and head coach Andy Reid is about as tight as it gets.

While other teams might struggle to get an ultimate read on lesser-known players, a team like the Chiefs might be able to take advantage of being in the weeds on some of these prospects for the last few years, having watched them on film even before they were draft eligible. It will be interesting to see if stable teams end up unearthing the best late-round finds in this year’s draft and how much the shift of a pre-draft season affected everyone.