https://theathletic.com/3081144/2022...o-matter-what/
On the morning of the 2017 NFL Draft, before Brett Veach rushed off to the office, his wife Alison handed him a small note, a message from their daughter, Ella, who was 6 years old and still working on her penmanship. The card contained just four words. It doubled as a reference to a three-year-old sports movie with sentimental value. It became, accidental or not, a mission statement for the Kansas City Chiefs, an ethos that would come to define the front office of a perennial Super Bowl contender and, one day, find itself hanging near Veach’s desk.
On a small piece of paper, in the sloppy handwriting of a 6-year-old, was the following demand:
“Pat no matter what.”
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Ella Veach, of course, had never seen the film “Draft Day,” in which Kevin Costner plays a Browns executive who becomes enamored with a pass rusher from Ohio State and scribbles a reminder on a Post-It note. (“Vontae Mack no matter what.”) Nor did she understand her dad’s own fascination with “Pat,” as in Patrick Mahomes, the big-armed quarterback from Texas Tech (though his wife, the source of the card, did). More than a year earlier, on a quiet day in Kansas City, Veach had been at the office on a weekend, working through tape on a Texas Tech lineman when he came across the damndest quarterback he’d ever seen. It was that day he told Andy Reid that he’d found the Chiefs’ next QB.
One man cannot manifest a draft pick into existence, particularly the co-director of player personnel; it takes the collective ingenuity of an entire front office — luck and sweat and sleepless nights and steadfast belief — not to mention the stomach for a deal. As Veach left his home, he still didn’t know if a proposed trade with the Bills would go through, or if the Chiefs would land Mahomes with the 10th pick. He did, however, know that he was still smitten, that the right quarterback was right there on paper, that it was Pat no matter what, and when the deal went through that night, he texted a photo of his daughter’s note to Mahomes.
Then he kept it.
“I told my wife, ‘We’ve got to hold onto this,’” Veach said. “’This might be worth money someday.’”
Those who know Brett Veach say he loves football players. That may sound like an obvious observation about an NFL general manager, but it’s the way Veach loves players that stands out. He obsesses over them. He studies them. He thinks in terms of levels of excitement. He doesn’t just love a player’s talent; he loves their story.
The first player Veach ever fell for was a high school running back named Gary Brown, who starred for Williamsport, not far from the Pennsylvania Coal Region where Veach grew up. Brown was a star, a bruising athlete who signed with Penn State; Veach, then a young kid, watched him play on a fall night and understood how important football could be. Next it was Ron Powlus, who starred at Berwick before Notre Dame. Then it was rivals from the Coal Region. When he was playing at Delaware in the late ’90s, his teammates marveled at how he seemed to know every college football player in the country.
“He didn’t just know the player, he knew about the player’s lineage,” said Jerry Oravitz, a former Delaware football staffer who now works as an assistant athletic director. “He’d know if his father played in the league or mom was an athlete. He really took the time to study and examine people and players.”
When Veach found Mahomes on film, it was much of the same: He took note of the arm strength and the off-platform throws, but it was the other stuff, too, the traits you notice after hours of film, like how his legs were built like a running back and his intelligence was off the charts. When he was elevated to Chiefs general manager three months after the 2017 draft, Veach sought to bring the same mentality to a bigger role, to know and learn every player like they were Patrick Mahomes or Gary Brown.
In the nearly five years since, the Chiefs won a Super Bowl championship in 2019 and played for another last year. They have the best quarterback in football and a Hall of Fame coach, which means that Veach has at once the easiest (and hardest) job in football. He is blessed with one of the best foundations in the NFL and burdened with the pressure of supplementing it. He is in a constant search for hidden talent. Even at age 44, he looks like he is perpetually 31 years old.
In the months after a humbling 31-9 loss to Tampa Bay in last year’s Super Bowl, his staff underwent one of its toughest challenges yet: They rebuilt their offensive line, acquiring Orlando Brown Jr. and Joe Thuney and drafting rookies Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith; they found a gem in rookie linebacker Nick Bolton, a second-round pick out of Missouri; they re-energized their defense in November, trading a sixth-round pick for pass rusher Melvin Ingram. If they can beat the Bills on Sunday, they can become the first NFL franchise outside of New England to appear in four consecutive conference championships since the Eagles in 2001-04.
That means something, too, because it was that year, in fact, that Veach first earned an opportunity as a training camp intern for Reid in Philadelphia. At that moment, he was a 20-something graduate assistant at Delaware who was vacillating between possible paths: a career in coaching, a future in athletics administration, the unknown of the NFL. When he arrived at Eagles camp, one of his first tasks was particularly important: He was asked to help find a new bed for a veteran receiver.
When his first Eagles training camp was over, Veach returned to the University of Delaware, where his time as a grad assistant would eventually morph into a full-time gig in athletic operations. The role was hardly glamorous; Veach spent most of his time assisting the football program, putting on summer camps, keeping schedules, doing anything that was asked. But even then, even when the assignment was pure grunt work, his superiors saw an inquisitive mind at work. “He wanted to understand why we were doing what we were doing,” said Oravitz, who helped Veach land the job.
Veach also had ideas — and he wasn’t afraid to voice them in his own passionate way. Once, he had tried to convince Delaware athletic director Edgar Johnson to sponsor a NASCAR driver during the races at Dover International Speedway. Veach, a fan of Jeff Gordon, went as far as crafting and presenting a detailed sketch of what a Delaware-themed car could look like. “Brett being Brett,” Oravitz said.
Veach had first arrived at Delaware in 1997, after an all-state turn as a running back at Mt. Carmel, a small-school powerhouse. In high school, he was listed at 5 feet 9 and maybe 180 pounds, which gave some college recruiters pause, but he was one of the fastest backs in Pennsylvania (“The Tyreek Hill of Mt. Carmel,” as one coach put it) and he possessed elite vision. As a strong student from a Catholic family, he’d dreamed of attending Notre Dame. But one day late in high school, an Irish receivers coach named Urban Meyer showed up in Mt. Carmel, sat down in the office of head coach Dave “Whitey” Williams and delivered the bad news: Notre Dame wasn’t interested.
“He just felt he didn’t have the size,” Williams said. “But I knew he had it all. Personally, I think they missed out.”
Veach instead headed for Delaware, a Division I-AA program, where he moved to receiver (hauling in passes from future NFL coach Matt Nagy), set school records in the return game and became the school’s first academic All-American in years. Before his senior season in 2001, head coach Tubby Raymond dangled the prospect of some added carries at running back, which whetted Veach’s appetite for competition. “I sort of like having the ability to know that it’s all on you,” he told a local reporter.
When his playing career ended, he stayed on at Delaware to complete a graduate degree. In the summers, he’d head to Eagles camp, where a Delaware connection led to a yearly internship. By 2006, he’d taken on a full-time job at Delaware, which meant he had to give up the camp gig, and for a moment, he wondered if he’d squandered his best shot to break into the NFL.
But soon, there was shuffling on the Eagles’ staff, and Veach received another phone call that would change his life: Reid was looking for a new assistant.
“I don’t know if he would admit this,” Oravitz said. “But I think a part of Brett was disappointed he never got a shot as a player to extend his career beyond Delaware, and I think that kind of fueled his passion to someday be in the NFL. I don’t know if he knew then what it might be.”
When you are in an entry level position in an NFL organization, there are only so many ways to get noticed. Veach came to understand the simplest way: Always be available.
For three years Veach was omnipresent, in the building when Reid was there, which was pretty much always. He picked up laundry, delivered food, paid more dues and, when he had a spare moment, put his inquisitive mind to use. Reid is famously empowering of young employees, asking for opinions and handing out assignments, even when he already has the answer.
The whole environment in Philly was collaborative and open, which was perfect for a junior employee with questions. And because Reid had personnel duties in addition to coaching, there were odd jobs that dealt with both. Joe Banner, the former Eagles president, can recall Veach popping into his office to quiz him on managing the salary cap. I saw we just did this deal; Why did we do that? Veach would ask how the team figured out a player’s value. He wanted to understand a contract negotiation from each side, asking for the agent’s side. The Eagles were innovators in handing out early contract extensions to better manage the cap; Veach wanted to know why.
“It was the first time I started even thinking about him in a bigger role,” Banner said, “because it was clear he just wanted to learn everything he could.”
In time, Veach would do the same with Louis Riddick, then a director of pro personnel, asking questions about roster composition or the practice squad or how to find talent at the margins. Veach also had a knack for scouting. When Reid asked him to go through a list of running backs before the 2009 draft, Veach famously became a full-on evangelist for LeSean McCoy, a Pitt product who had gone to high school in Harrisburg, an hour away from Mt. Carmel. The Eagles took McCoy in the second round; he wound up making six Pro Bowls and rushing for 11,000 career yards. “It was pretty obvious quickly that his insights were really good,” Banner said.
Still, it was not exactly clear then where Veach was headed. The head coach’s assistant often uses the role as a springboard into coaching, but as Veach settled in, he started to gravitate toward the personnel side, where he could focus in on players. One year, in the early days, he was at Eagles camp when he caught up with his old high school coach. Williams, from Mt. Carmel, liked to tease Veach about his wide range of duties for Reid. “Are you gonna be his gopher your whole life?” he asked.
“I’ll never forget the day he looked at me,” Williams said. “He said: ‘Coach, some day I’m gonna be a GM.’”
After three years together, Reid had come to trust Veach, both his competency and his judgment, his people skills and his intelligence. If he didn’t know yet that Veach would become a general manager, he did know where his passion lay. In 2010, Veach became a full-time scout. Three years later, he followed Reid to Kansas City.
“He just was very, very good with his evaluations,” Reid said earlier this year. “I felt like he had a pretty good grasp on the personnel thing. That’s the direction he chose. We kind of guided him in that direction.”
Soon after Veach became the Chiefs’ general manager, Eric Stonestreet felt a slap on his back. It was Brett Veach. Stonestreet, a Kansas City area native and actor on the sit-com “Modern Family,” was back in town in 2017. Veach, seconds upon meeting him, had a simple request: “Bro, I need to introduce you to my daughter.”
Some time after that, they exchanged numbers and became routine text buddies. Which is how Stonestreet got a first-hand look at the next three years — the rise of Mahomes in 2018, the Super Bowl championship the next year, the contract worth a half a billion dollars. Stonestreet has been going to Chiefs games since the 1980s, when he splurged on second-row season tickets in the end zone. But beyond football, he connected with Veach on a deeper level, two grinders who had come from the outside and put in the work.
When Veach arrived in Kansas City, he spent two years as a pro and college personnel analyst before ascending to the co-director of player personnel, and after two more years, general manager. As Stonestreet saw it, Veach was in the business of making dreams and busting dreams, of identifying talent and putting people in position to succeed. “There were plenty of people in my life that told me I wasn’t good enough,” Stonestreet said. “I just respect how he dances that dance with people — from a human perspective.”
At some point, as the conversation continued and their friendship blossomed, Veach shared a photo of his daughter’s card from the 2017 draft, which is how Stonestreet got the idea for a special gift. He asked Veach’s assistant Kunal Tanna to take a better photo, and then he sent it to a friend who happens to be a woodworker, which is how a specialty engraving — enlarged and framed — wound up in Veach’s office, his daughter’s handwriting capturing the moment a franchise changed, the moment that Veach’s abiding belief in players came into perfect focus:
Pat no matter what.
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