Chiefs GM Brett Veach explains his unique draft board structure ahead of the 2024 NFL draft

Kansas City Chiefs GM Brett Veach continues to put the final touches on the team's draft board ahead of the 2024 NFL draft. 

He says they'll keep tinkering with the draft board until Thursday night when Round 1 officially begins. Each draft is the culmination of a long process of grading hundreds of players and deciding where they land on the board. 

Veach doesn't typically quantify the number of players on the Chiefs' draft board. This year he got a tally on the entire draft board because he anticipated media members would ask him about it in his pre-draft press conference. 

"I wrote that down," Veach said. "I knew someone was going to ask me that. Because I never know, I just see a bunch of names up there. I don't like to count them, I sort of just move them around. And I have them in like, 'pockets.' But I was walking in here I said, "Someone's gonna ask me exactly how many guys I have on the board.'" 

How many players are on the Chiefs' draft board and how good are they?

It all starts with the players with first-round grades. While there might be 32 picks in Round 1, you'll never find a draft class that has 32 players with first-round grades. Most players selected in the back half of Round 1 are players with "high" second-round grades.

"I think there are 16-18 guys this year that we have first-round grades on," Veach said. "You factor in some quarterbacks there. Then maybe some teams go in different directions that are contradictory to what our board has. So you figure 16 to 18 names four maybe five quarterbacks." 

As for the exact number of prospects on the draft board, that number is quite high. It's a number so high that a reporter joked that Veach's predecessor John Dorsey would disapprove of it. 

"Hey, (John) Dorsey would be appalled at you for having 221 names on your board," ESPN Adam Teicher said in jest.

"Yeah," Veach said, with a chuckle. "It's too many." 

Dorsey, of course, is a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the NFL draft, having learned under the great Ron Wolf in Green Bay. However, there's a bit of a catch with the latter portion of the draft board for Veach. 

"It's 221, which is a lot," Veach said. "But you'd have to come in here and be with me one day to see how I process this, because like, I have guys in the sixth or seventh round on my board, but I always know that we'll never get to the sixth and seventh round. So, the total number of players on the board is 221. But in my mind, there's kind of like a line right there." 

Prospects who grade out in the sixth and seventh rounds often never end up getting selected in the sixth and seventh rounds. Those two rounds of the draft board actually serve as a separate draft board for priority undrafted free agents. 

"Those guys in sixth and seventh, we keep on the board, because that's where I want to work that on (undrafted) free agency," Veach explained. "And so, I know where I'm going as soon as the draft is over, the guys that we had on the board at 6 and 7. Again, we'll have plenty of numbers we'll never get to them. But that's my free agency board and that's kind of how we worked through that."

So, while the Chiefs might have themselves a monster of a draft board with over 200 names, only a select group of those names are relevant to the draft. It's the process that Veach and his staff have developed over the years. It might be one that others consider adopting as Veach has a pair of Lombardi Trophies in back-to-back years to prove its efficacy.