Nate Taylor had a barn burner of about 5 minutes on the Time's Ours podcast, giving us as good a look inside the Chiefs draft room as there exists from an independent source.

He (irritatingly) summarizes the Chiefs reactions to several picks:

At 21, Q Johnston goes to the Chargers: the draft room goes "eesh"

At 22, Zay goes to Baltimore: "damn"

At 27, A. Harrison to the Jags:

At 28, Murphy goes to the Bengals: sign of relief

But the one that hurt them the most was the Cowboys selection of Mazi Smith.

The Chiefs didn't bring in Mazi, they went to Michigan to meet with him, which Taylor says his agent must have leveraged to see if he could get a team to pick him earlier (as agents do).

What made Veach smarter than all of us, Taylor says, is that these flashy, rules-threatening practice workouts where receiver after receiver works out in flashy, social-media-friendly snippets in Texas with Pat Mahomes, in an effort to get some misdirection going in the minds of other players (and most of the fans of this fan base -- okay, including me, alright?).

They felt that Mazi next to Jones would be "special." And when Mazi went to Dallas, it got very tense in the room, and the Chiefs draft room started seriously flirting with trading down at that point.

They were satisfied and perfectly happy with taking FAU, but he was not at the top of their board.

Much to my chagrin, there was no mention in the podcast about Nolan Smith, which leads me to believe he truly was not on their radar as a scheme fit.
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