Kansas City Chiefs: Grading each 2021 NFL Draft selection
By John Newman
The 2021 NFL Draft is in the history books: Locked in, never to be changed, immutable. The Kansas City Chiefs walked away this year with six new members on their roster: Four offensive players, two defensive players, three of whom play in the trenches.
The Chiefs didn’t make any splashy moves and that’s a good thing: They’ve hosted the AFC Championship three years in a row and have been to the Super Bowl two years in a row. They don’t need to burn future draft capital for an unknown quantity. The Kansas City Chiefs already have a roster that’s a contender in 2021.
The front office mostly had to focus on depth players this year, perhaps finding a developmental player or two for the future. So how did the Chief’s front office handle their draft picks this year? Considering they came into the 2021 NFL Draft without a first-rounder, it looks like the Chiefs walked away this year with a half dozen solid prospects, some of whom could become contributors in 2021. That’s pretty good, considering they only had two picks in the top 100.
There is an expression in football analytics: processes are more stable and predictive than results are. What does that mean? In this context, it means the process in which a front office makes personnel decisions should be judged more important than the player’s career results.
Sometimes draft picks don’t pan out in the NFL. But if your front office is constructing a roster effectively, with sound and proven methods every offseason, then the odds are in their favor of succeeding eventually. So before we get into the player grades, let’s evaluate how the Chiefs’ front office handled their draft picks this year and how it will affect their 2021 regular season.
Front office grade: A-
General manager Brett Veach ignored the ill-advised Siren’s call to trade up on Day Two, preferring to hold tight with their assigned picks. Trading up for a player that isn’t a quarterback is generally considered a bad strategy and is statistically less likely to pay off, at least according to a PFF study. Yet every year teams move up, thinking that THEIR guy is a can’t-miss. The Kansas City Chiefs only traded up once this year and it was in the fifth round for a developmental tight end, effectively swapping fifth and sixth-round picks with the New York Jets. A good value considering the position.
The Chiefs’ biggest roster moves this offseason happened during free agency. The headline of this offseason for the Chiefs was its offensive line getting a complete rebuild from the ground up. After a disastrous collapse in Super Bowl LV (where quarterback Patrick Mahomes became the most pressured quarterback in a Super Bowl ever), the porous and injured offensive line took the lion’s share of the blame for the loss. Now, they have surrounded Mahomes with a potent combination of veterans on free-agent deals and promising youngsters.
The front office made a lot of good decisions on draft night, prioritizing the trenches in a year where plenty of quality offensive linemen were available. Since Mahomes is the focal point of this team’s offense anyway, it only makes sense to make sure there are redundancies on the offensive side of the ball. But none of their picks felt like a reach and they didn’t make any drastic trade-ups that could have cost them down the road.
The front office got a few (probable) starters and some promising depth pieces for a roster full of Pro Bowlers in the 2021 NFL Draft. The process was sound for a team coming off a Super Bowl loss: Pinpointing the problem and fixing it in free agency while augmenting it in the draft. Most fans shouldn’t expect much better than that from an NFL team that looks to have a wide-open window of Super Bowl contention. Now click below to see individual player grades for the Kansas City Chiefs from this past weekend.