https://theathletic.com/2330642/2021...trick-mahomes/
Conviction, loyalty, subterfuge: What it took for Chiefs to land Patrick Mahomes
by
Jayson Jenks, Dan Pompei, Mike Sando and Nate Taylor
Originally Posted by :
Six weeks before the 2017 NFL Draft, in the middle of another Kansas City winter, the ranking members of the Chiefs’ brain trust dialed into a conference call.
Clark Hunt, the team’s owner, was on the phone.
So were the franchise’s three most influential front-office voices: head coach Andy Reid, general manager John Dorsey and co-director of player personnel Brett Veach.
What they discussed that day was so dramatic in its potential to elevate or sink the franchise that some in the organization, once they learned of the plan, reacted to the idea with just two words:
“Holy shit.”
The Chiefs, everyone on the call understood, would attempt to trade up in the first round to take Patrick Mahomes, quarterback from Texas Tech.
Mahomes had first appeared on the Chiefs’ radar in 2014, when Veach told Reid that Mahomes was the greatest player he’d ever seen — even though Mahomes had started all of four games in college. Over the next two years, Veach hounded Reid and Dorsey about Mahomes’ singular brilliance until they, too, fell in love.
Now they had to go get him.
And to do that, they knew they had to move up a long way, from No. 27 into the top 10.
There are so many small moments that lead to a franchise-altering decision: a butterfly effect of passion, conviction, loyalty, subterfuge and sheer dumb luck. Never was that more clear than with the Chiefs’ pursuit of Mahomes. Had Veach not fallen for Mahomes, had Reid not signed off on developing a young quarterback, had Dorsey not had the connections to covertly execute the trade, the Chiefs might still be chasing their first Super Bowl in 51 years.
If they were going to pull it off, however, their intention had to remain a secret. Fewer than 10 people in the entire organization knew about the plan for fear that another team would beat them to Mahomes. Reid worried about the Saints at pick No. 11. Dorsey worried about the Chargers at seven. Veach feared a run on quarterbacks; once one went, would they all go? When Dorsey spoke to executives around the league about trading up, he covered his tracks by praising Alabama linebacker Reuben Foster, a top-10 talent who made sense for the defense-needy Chiefs. Even some Chiefs players were led to believe that the team’s first-round pick would be a linebacker.
On the morning of the draft, Dorsey called his counterpart in Buffalo, Doug Whaley, to check in. Two days earlier, the pair had nailed down the parameters of a trade that would net the Chiefs the 10th pick in the draft — and, hopefully, Mahomes. Dorsey’s message to Whaley that morning might have also applied to the entire Chiefs organization:
“Don’t get scared now.”
No one lobbied for Mahomes harder than Brett Veach, but that Veach was in a position of influence in Kansas City was something of a football fable.
A decade earlier, in February 2007, he was working a University of Delaware lacrosse game when his phone rang. Technically, Veach, a former receiver at Delaware, was the school’s “supervisor of intercollegiate athletic events,” but that was a catch-all title for a thousand-and-one responsibilities. Veach attacked them all with a maniacal energy. At the lacrosse game, the temperature never topped 35 degrees, and Veach was so busy that he didn’t notice he had missed a call.
It was Eagles coach Andy Reid.
In the summer of 2004, Veach had interned for the Eagles at training camp as the assistant to James Urban, who at the time was Reid’s assistant (making Veach the assistant to the assistant to the head coach). Veach’s energy, diligence and memory impressed Urban. “He could recall players, stats, where they were from, anything you were looking for,” Urban says. “He remembered those little details that sometimes go unnoticed, and I was like ‘Man, this guy has a mind for football, he really knows it.'”
So in February 2007, when Urban was promoted to the Eagles’ coaching staff, he recommended Veach as his replacement. Before Veach’s first week on the job, he told a reporter from his local paper what he’d learned about Reid. “If you’re willing to work hard,” he said, “he’s loyal to his people.”
For the next three years, Veach was Reid’s shadow. “If you saw Andy, you saw Brett Veach,” says Brian Westbook, the former Eagles running back. Reid slept at the office on Sunday and Monday nights; so did Veach. Reid got to the facility at 4 a.m.; Veach did, too. If Reid wanted a late-night cheeseburger or needed his oil changed, Veach was his guy.
It was grunt-level work but not without reward. Reid is famous for his eye for detail — front-office personnel were told not to have their hands in their pockets at practice, for instance — so “for all the small things that Brett was doing,” Westbrook says, “Andy saw them.”
On top of all of Veach’s other duties, Reid started to throw him entry-level scouting assignments. One of Veach’s early jobs was to cross-check a running back whom the organization’s scouts had already evaluated. Veach fell in love with the player’s tape, then bugged Reid about him constantly. Reid listened, and the Eagles drafted LeSean McCoy in the second round in 2009. Early the next year, Veach was promoted to a full-time scout.
Fueled by Red Bull, Veach oozed energy. When he liked a player, he wore people out with his persistence — exactly the kind of conviction Reid valued. One time, a member of the personnel staff chided a scout for being a “salesman” when he talked about a player. Reid interjected.
“No, I want a salesman,” he said. “I want someone to show me why they like the guy and express that.”
Sometimes Veach would ask Ryan Grigson, the Eagles’ director of player personnel, to come into his office, where he had college film queued up. Once inside, Veach would lay out his argument for the player he liked, building his case clip by clip. By the time Grigson walked out, Veach had planted a seed. “His energy level and his persuasion were elite,” Grigson says. “He would get you thinking afterward, ‘Maybe I better look at this guy more …'”
When Reid left Philadelphia for Kansas City in 2013, he brought only one person from the Eagles’ player personnel and scouting department with him:
Brett Veach.
From day one with the Chiefs, Reid did not hide from his top challenge. “I’ve got to find the next Len Dawson, doggone it,” he said at his introductory news conference.
Kansas City had the No. 1 draft pick that spring, but Reid soon realized there wasn’t a single quarterback prospect with superstar potential and the Chiefs never considered drafting a QB first. Two weeks later, Kansas City traded two second-round picks to San Francisco in exchange for dependable veteran Alex Smith.
But just a year after the Smith trade, Veach watched a young Mahomes. A pro and college personnel analyst in Kansas City, Veach loved Mahomes’ arm strength, the way he could turn chaos into big plays. But it was Texas Tech’s 2015 bowl game against LSU that blew Veach away. Mahomes and the Red Raiders were outmatched at just about every position, yet the quarterback made play after play.
“You see toughness, competitiveness, but you also see a guy who’s able to elevate those around him,” Veach said later. “I think that’s certainly a characteristic of a great quarterback.”
After spending so much time around Reid, Veach seemed to adopt one of Reid’s fundamental tenets for evaluating players: pursue elite talent. Anyone who worked for Reid knew he didn’t want safe players; he wanted guys who could be special, even if there was risk. After the bowl game, Veach became a full-on evangelist, preaching the good word of Patrick Lavon Mahomes II. He sent Reid clip after clip, sometimes 10 at a time, and raved about Mahomes in scouting meetings, even when the quarterback wasn’t the topic of the day. Chomping on spearmint gum and downing 5-Hour Energy drinks, Veach hounded Dorsey and Reid — “to the point that I think coach Reid even got annoyed with it,” one source said.
Veach never wavered, and either he or Chris Ballard, the Chiefs’ director of football operations, attended every one of Mahomes’ games in 2016.
It was a testament to Reid and Dorsey that Veach felt empowered enough to push for Mahomes even though scouting Texas Tech wasn’t part of his duties: Reid had always wanted conviction in the front office; Dorsey cared more about getting good players than how he got them.
Reid knew to trust Veach when he loved a guy, as had been the case with both McCoy and DeSean Jackson in Philadelphia. And in the clips Veach sent him, Reid saw moments when Mahomes defied football logic. He rolled right, looked right, then connected on a throw back to the left — and almost made it look sensible. “Whoa,” Reid would say to himself. “That’s something.”
For years Reid had hunted for a franchise quarterback. During Reid’s final year in Philadelphia, he wanted to take Russell Wilson in the third round, but the Seahawks beat the Eagles to it by 13 picks. Reid had waited too long to make his move. Just the year before, in 2016, the Chiefs had tried to trade up for Paxton Lynch but didn’t have the draft capital to make it happen.
Mahomes was different, but it wouldn’t matter if the Chiefs couldn’t trade up.
At the combine in March 2017, John Dorsey, in his fifth year as the Chiefs GM, passed along a casual message to Bills GM Doug Whaley: “Hey, keep us in mind if you want to move down.” Dorsey sought out Whaley for a couple of reasons. Not only did Buffalo hold the No. 10 pick, but also he’d known Whaley for almost 20 years. If a deal was discussed, he trusted Whaley to be discreet.
Dorsey once made his living as a special-teams player, putting his head down and running full-bore into the wedge. As an executive, he operated pretty much the same way: blunt, honest, straight to the point. But a draft-day move of this significance was a dance, more art than science.
In early April, Mahomes traveled to Kansas City for a pre-draft visit with the Chiefs. It was a pivotal moment for Veach, who was eager to see Reid’s reaction. The coach had watched the quarterback’s tape and been impressed, but now he got to see what Mahomes was made of up close. “He was giving every test he could, just grilling Patrick,” says Mitch Holthus, the Chiefs’ radio play-by-play announcer. “Andy loved him.” One source described the scene in the team’s practice facility that day as two football souls coming together.
A smiling Reid gave Veach a thumbs up.
About a week before the draft, trade talks with the Bills intensified. Dorsey never said whom he intended to draft, and Whaley never asked, but he didn’t think the Chiefs, a playoff team in 2016, were trading up for a quarterback. In an interesting twist, Buffalo owner Terry Pegula loved Mahomes about as much as Veach. But first-year coach Sean McDermott thought selecting a developmental quarterback that early might undercut his message that the Bills were serious about winning now. The Bills figured Mahomes might still be available late in the first round, and if not, they felt fine targeting the position in a quarterback-heavy 2018 class.
“A lot of the league felt like, ‘Hey, you get this guy bottom of the first round and you sit him and see what happens, that is great,'” Whaley says. “Top 10? You are really rolling the dice and putting your gonads out there.”
In the course of the trade talks, the Bills called the Chiefs and upped their asking price. The Chiefs didn’t blink. They believed in Mahomes so much they were willing to trade multiple first-round picks for him — they had even tried to get as high as the first pick. (Had Kansas City stayed at No. 27, Dorsey liked LSU cornerback Tre’Davious White.)
About two days before the draft, Dorsey and Whaley hammered out the final details of a deal. The Chiefs would trade No. 27 overall, a third-round pick and their 2018 first-round pick to the Bills for the No. 10 pick in the draft. “Then I got nervous,” Dorsey says. “Because any trade that is a verbal commitment, you get fricking scared.”
All the Chiefs could do was wait.
They were concerned about the quarterback-hungry teams in the top 10, including the Browns, picking first, the Bears, picking third, and the Chargers, picking seventh. The Browns had been tied to Mitchell Trubisky, who grew up in Mentor, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, though some suspected their front office was trying to spread the word in the hopes of enticing a team to trade up.
Whom the Bears wanted with the third pick was a mystery, even to most of the scouts and coaches in their own organization. According to multiple sources, general manager Ryan Pace told only a small group of confidants in his front office. Chicago’s draft board did not reflect Pace’s grades because he feared leaks. Many in positions of authority, including head coach John Fox, weren’t told whom Pace would pick until the day of the draft; some in the front office didn’t find out until the selection was announced.
When the Bears started talking to the 49ers about moving up to the second spot, the 49ers — and some in the Bears front office — thought Chicago wanted to draft Stanford defensive lineman Solomon Thomas, for whom defensive coordinator Vic Fangio had been pushing hard. Others at Halas Hall, including Fox, were hoping for LSU safety Jamal Adams.
Pace had quietly been following Trubisky all year, and even without his grades factored in, the Bears draft board had Trubisky first, Mahomes second and Deshaun Watson third. Multiple Bears evaluators, however, didn’t think any of the quarterbacks were worthy of the third pick, let alone the second.
The Bears had concerns about Mahomes’ ability to transition from the air raid offense to a pro-style scheme, a fear also shared by Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers. Plus, Mahomes went 13-16 at Texas Tech, and some of those losses could be directly traced to his questionable decision-making. “That vertical passing attack and his confidence probably led to him forcing some things,” one evaluator says. “Which is when you saw the inconsistencies, the interceptions and the losses.”
Pace had come close to trading up for a quarterback twice before. He regretted not getting Marcus Mariota in 2015 or Carson Wentz in 2016, so on draft night, after Cleveland decided to go with Texas A&M pass rusher Myles Garrett at No. 1, Pace stunned the NFL by trading four picks to move up to the second spot and drafting Trubisky.
Dorsey and the Chiefs knew there were still sharks out there, namely Tom Telesco and the Chargers at No. 7. Philip Rivers was 35 years old and coming off a season in which he had a league-high 21 interceptions. Dorsey wondered whether Los Angeles might draft Rivers’ heir, but to the Chiefs’ delight, the Chargers instead took Mike Williams, a wide receiver out of Clemson.
The team Reid most feared was the Saints at No. 11, and with good reason. About the time the Chargers picked Williams, Saints coach Sean Payton pulled Drew Brees aside and told his star quarterback, “Hey, look, I’m just giving you a heads up, if this guy is the guy that’s there and he’s high on our board, we’re going to probably end up taking him. It’s not a reflection on you, it’s just an opportunity.”
Around the same time, Whaley called Dorsey to rehash the parameters of the trade one more time. “He told me, I repeated it, he repeated it, and we said OK,” Whaley says. With the Bills on the clock at No. 10, Dorsey called back. “Let’s get it done,” he said.
“Let me call you right back,” Whaley replied.
It was a stall tactic. “We just wanted to make sure no one else called that would give us a better deal,” Whaley says. The Chiefs waited. Nine minutes left. Eight minutes. Veach was on the edge of his seat. Seven minutes, six. Still nothing. Finally, with about five minutes on the clock, Whaley called Dorsey. They went over the parameters of the trade one more time, just to be sure. Dorsey outlined the terms first, Whaley repeated them back. Someone from the Bills wrote the details down and sent the trade into the league office. It was official.
In the Chiefs’ second-floor draft room, Dorsey turned to his lieutenants. “This shit is going to happen,” he said. Reid, wearing a red and white Hawaiian shirt, quieted the room almost immediately: “We have to get Alex on the phone,” he said, wanting to make sure Smith heard the news from the team first.
Once that important call was finished, Reid smiled as Mahomes put on a Chiefs hat. Perhaps the most nervous person in the room was Veach, red-cheeked and baggy-eyed, his bold evaluation of Mahomes rewarded by a show of faith that began many, many years ago. Just minutes after the pick, Veach and Dorsey hugged.
A few floors below the draft room, the Chiefs hosted more than 4,000 fans for a watch party at their indoor practice field, and after the pick, a common callback echoed throughout the party: “Maybe this kid is the one!”
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