‘We got it done!’: The inside story of how Patrick Mahomes landed with the Chiefs
 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...d-with-chiefs/

We got it done!’: The inside story of how Patrick Mahomes landed with the Chiefs

Sometime after the fall of 2015, Brett Veach, then the Kansas City Chiefs’ director of player personnel, was studying offensive linemen for the upcoming NFL draft. As Veach evaluated game film of Texas Tech offensive tackle Le’Raven Clark, another player on the screen distracted his focus. The Red Raiders’ sophomore quarterback made one unfathomable throw after another. He overcame his rawness with uncommon athleticism.

Those clips formed the basis of an obsession for Veach. And they were the Chiefs’ unofficial introduction to Patrick Mahomes.

On Saturday, Mahomes will continue his incandescent first season as Chiefs’ starting quarterback in a divisional round game against the Indianapolis Colts, both the NFL’s presumptive MVP and an avatar for the sport’s future. Mahomes passed for more than 5,000 yards and threw 50 touchdown passes, leading the Chiefs to 12 wins and the AFC’s top seed. His starburst, at age 23, made clear Mahomes could turn the Chiefs into an annual Super Bowl contender.

As Mahomes readies for his postseason debut, it is worth revisiting how the Chiefs landed perhaps the most valuable asset in professional football — and in the process kept him away from other pursuers. What began with Veach studying Clark ended with the Chiefs setting their course for 10 or 15 years. They traded two first-round picks and a third-round pick to move up to the 10th spot in the 2017 draft to poach Mahomes, then incubated him for his rookie season before unleashing him on the NFL. The process required personal connections, dogged pursuit, bold action and a little luck.

“This was a case of probably the perfect storm in a whole bunch of ways,” Mahomes’s agent Leigh Steinberg said in a phone interview.

“When I told him we work with Patrick, he was like, ‘Let’s slide out of here and talk a little bit,’” Cabott recalled in a phone interview.

Veach informed Cabott the Chiefs had grown enamored of Mahomes. At that point, Veach may have been talking out of turn. He loved Mahomes and believed, contrary to consensus, Mahomes was clearly the best quarterback available. But Veach had yet to cultivate the opinion throughout Kansas City’s organization.

In Cabott, Veach had a fellow Mahomes evangelist. Cabott discovered Mahomes while watching him play a bowl game as a freshman. He called a member of his agency’s board and said he had seen the best quarterback in the 2017 draft. He started cultivating a relationship with Mahomes’s family, eventually summoning the nerve to cold-call Mahomes’s mother, Randi, at work.

Great read. Makes me feel like we were even luckier than before to land him, all it would’ve taken was one team trading up to 10 or higher such as Arizona or Cleveland.

It was by grace of the Football Gods we landed Patrick Mahomes

I still wonder if Veach’s job on Mahomes didn’t play a pretty significant role in the Dorsey firing/Veach hiring.

Basically Veach is the one who got everyone on board with Mahomes, then he gets interviewed for the Bills job just after that draft.... I just wonder if Clark/Andy were afraid to lose Veach long term.

Nice read, especially Steinbergs comments.

what brilliant gamesmanship by all parties involved.

John Dorsey's Fanboys scoff at that notion

Am I the only one who ever sits back and wonders what it would be like had he wound up elsewhere? What if the Bears had taken him? And somehow we wound up with Trubisky or Watson? What would it be like watching this generational QB from afar and dreaming of having someone that dominant?

It really helps me put how amazing this entire season has been into perspective. However it ends. We'll never have an experience like this in our lives again. It's magic.

The other part is don't discount how much it helped his development to have Reid and the other coaches, + sitting for a year and learning from Smiff.

I think this is especially true with QBs, but also more than people give credit for to other positions. Situation is huge and there's really no way to know how it would have played out differently in a different situation.

For instance Demarcus Robinson is starting to look like a solid #2 receiver in this system with Mahomes. In another system he might be out of the league by now. Or maybe Tyreek Hill never develops into an elite receiver w/o Reid's guidance. Who knows. Maybe Ryan Leaf has a long NFL career in another situation.

I think we hit the best possible QB candidate since Luck, and the best possible situation. So we're seeing that ceiling now. If Mahomes goes to Chicago and Trubisky comes here - maybe they're both really good but Mahomes isn't elite. So at least for now we wouldn't even know what we missed out on.

Although we'd still be jerking off to Mahomes' crazy throws and whining about Trubisky. That's for sure.

Well, we had 4 decades where we missed every Marino, Rodgers, Davre, Montana, etc etc. at some point even a blind squirrel finds a nut and we found it finally.


We had 2008 #5 and loved Matt Ryan. He went a bit earlier than expected st #3. He could’ve been here 10-12 years too. Instead we got Glenn “megaBust” Dorsey. Etc

Mean to be!

Well, regardless, even more than Brett Veach, the one person we should thank for Mahomes is John Elway. Had he not traded up to take Paxton Lynch just ahead of us, we would likely never have drafted Mahomes.

Smokescreen to confuse Horseface, brah.

1) Veach and the Chiefs played the draft process perfectly. Mahomes is lucky to have landed in KC, and vice versa.

2) There was plenty of smoke around Mahomes at 10 to KC. If draft pundits and other teams didn’t buy it, that’s just the fallacy of groupthink.

Draft night 2017 was easily my favorite moment as a Chiefs fan.