Heading into the 2022 NFL Draft, the Kansas City Chiefs—and specifically their general manager Brett Veach—was known to stick to a few hard and fast rules.
It happens with every leader. Over the course of 20 years, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, then with Philadelphia as the leader of the Eagles, became known as the coach who could not win the big game. Bill Belichick is a cold leader when it comes to personnel because he will trade away his best players before they’ve started to fade. John Elway is unable to draft a quarterback. You get the drift.
When certain behaviors are exhibited over a period of time, a person or organization becomes known for such attitudes or actions and that’s true inside and outside of the NFL. But sometimes, those banners placed over a person or place or thing can be incorrect or limiting and, consequently, we are surprised when someone breaks their own “rules,” as if they were the ones who stated them in the first place.
Let’s take a look at the lessons we learned about Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach over the course of the 2022 NFL Draft.
This past draft weekend, Chiefs Kingdom watched Veach and his brilliant front office staff shatter all sorts of conventions about the way Kansas City was expected to do business. The rules were thrown out. The labels were ripped off. The notions were deemed false.
The end result was, at least on paper, a very strong draft class that’s earned acclaim from those who watch the Chiefs up close as well as those with a national scope of the NFL in view. Sometimes a person has to break the rules in order to achieve the desired ends and apparently that’s what Veach and company had to do this spring. Or maybe there were no real rules in place after all.
Here’s a look at the ways in which Veach defied expectations in the 2022 NFL Draft.