KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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General Manager Brett Veach hopes to add juice to the Kansas City Chiefs’ roster in the 2025 NFL Draft, which begins Thursday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but changes at the college level continue to make that quest harder as the rounds progress.
“We kind of started to see a shift in the dynamics with the draft during the COVID period when players got an additional year,” Veach said. “Now with the NIL (name, image and likeness), it certainly impacts the later rounds. There’s a lot of motivation and incentive for players to just stay in college.”
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For the 2021 NFL Draft, the last before NIL payments became legal in college sports, 130 players declared early for the draft. That number dipped to 70 this year.
“If you stay in school, you can, in many instances, make more money in college football than you can in the NFL (on a rookie contract),” Mit Winter, a college sports attorney with Kennyhertz Perry in Kansas City, said. “... There are guys in college football, some QBs, making $3 (million) up to $4 million per year, which they're not going to make if you're a third-round pick, or even in a lot of cases, a second-round pick.”
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy was the last pick in the 2022 NFL Draft, but he emerged as the team’s starter, leading Kyle Shanahan’s squad to the NFC Championship Game as a rookie, then a Super Bowl the next year.
His rookie contract is a four-year deal worth a little more than $3.7 million — good money, but not compared to Carson Beck.
After transferring from Georgia to Miami, Beck signed an NIL deal worth up to $4 million with the Canes Connection NIL collective, but his agent said he’s made nearly $10 million in NIL overall in the last 12 months, according to Front Office Sports.
That’s a powerful incentive to stay in school.
“You have the chance to develop some guys if, obviously, you can pay them, you can entice them to come back,” Mizzou football coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “You look at the success we had two years ago with Darius Robinson, Ennis Rakestraw, (Jaylon Carlies) — those guys all came back for another year of development and now they’re having tremendous careers, or successful careers, in the NFL.”
Drinkwitz said there’s no point fighting it, and he doesn’t begrudge the players.
“Right now, with the unregulated market, it helps them financially,” he said. “There’s guys out there making more money — which is great for them — but they’re making more money than they will on their rookie contracts in the NFL.”
Still, it makes Veach’s job tougher, especially the final four rounds on Saturday.
“You’re starting to see that the numbers are a little bit shorter and the ages are a little bit higher, so it makes it a little bit more challenging to identify guys in that later round,” Veach said.
After plucking three contributors in the seventh round of the 2022 NFL Draft, Kansas City’s only landed only impact player — Hunter Nourzad, who carved out a special-teams role last season — in the fifth through seventh rounds of the last two drafts.
The Chiefs added cornerbacks Jaylen Watson and Nazeeh Johnson, along with running back Isiah Pacheco, in the seventh round three years ago.
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