Arrowhead Pride
Once again, Kansas City GM Brett Veach reached on only a couple of his selections.
With the weekend’s NFL Draft behind us, let’s take a closer look at which teams reached on their picks — or got the most value from them.
We can do this by subtracting each player’s overall pick number from their pre-draft prospect ranking — in this case, from Arrowhead Pride’s consensus prospect rankings. The resulting reach value tells us whether the team obtained good value from the pick (a negative number) or reached past the player’s value (a positive number).
Then by averaging the values for each team’s selections, we can see which franchises got the best value from their draft picks in Detroit.
As you can see, the Kansas City Chiefs got the best perceived value from their 2024 draft picks
We call this perceived value because we compare players’ draft positions to where outside NFL analysts expected them to be taken. Through the opening rounds of the draft, a consensus draft prospect ranking tends to stay pretty close to what teams will do. (We calculate this by averaging the reach value for all picks in each round). In a ndraft’s final rounds, however, the average reach value tends to take a big jump.
In 2024, the consensus ranking predicted the draft fairly well through the fifth round. So let’s see how teams compared during those rounds.
We see that ranks changed for most teams — but the Chiefs remained at the top.
When we ran this analysis in 2023, the Chiefs ranked 24th through seven rounds and 17th through the first three. In 2022, the Chiefs ranked sixth through all rounds, but fifth through the opening three. (For comparison, Kansas City ranked sixth through 2024’s third round).
Here’s how the Chiefs did with all of their 2024 picks.
Just as he did in 2023, general manager Brett Veach got good perceived value on most of his picks, while reaching on just two of them.
Remember: it’s always a mistake to draw too many conclusions immediately after a draft.
The real measure of how Kansas City navigated the 2024 iteration of the league’s selection meeting will ultimately be found in how these new players perform in the coming seasons — and whether the team continues its unprecedented success.
But at this moment, this is the best kind of analysis we can make: comparing what we expected to happen with what did happen.
Even then, there’s no way to know how our consensus prospect ranking compared to how the Chiefs (or any other team) graded these players. For all we know, Veach was always taking the best player on his board.
So while we can’t yet say exactly how well Kansas City navigated this draft, our first impression is very good.
