The Chiefs have thrown curveballs at the NFL Draft. Why that’d be a mistake this week

The final few days before the NFL Draft are providing us something of a replica of the draft itself.

A bit of chaos.

Almost as though we’ve all grown bored with the mock drafts matching players with the same set of teams over and over again, the real twists and turns in many of those mocks have arrived this week. A couple of the more recent ones, for example, have the Chiefs plucking a running back with their first-round pick. A couple more peg an interior lineman.

Pass. And pass.

If you’ve come to this space in the past couple of weeks, you already know I think it would be a good idea for the Chiefs to grab a running back at some point during this draft.

But not at No. 31.

For goodness’ sake, no, not at No. 31.

I’m not saying it won’t ever happen. Not even saying those mock drafts are wrong. I’m saying it shouldn’t ever happen, and that it particularly shouldn’t happen this week.

The opposition to the whole notion isn’t only because running backs have a really difficult time living up to any first-round value — which, ahem, they rarely do live up to their draft slot, because the running game is more about scheme and the five guys up front than it is the back. More than that, though, this is about the strategy the Chiefs ought to take in the early rounds of the draft in Kansas City.

Just throw the fastball.

Leave the curveball at home.

Over the past few years, PFF has studied the value of early-round draft picks based on their positions — essentially comparing their on-field production to their contracts, which are determined by the rookie wage scale.

The data illustrates that four positions separate themselves in terms of value per dollar (which in this case is value per pick) — edge rushers, offensive tackles, defensive tackles and wide receivers.

To be clear, this is a blueprint for any draft, not an editorial regarding the talent distribution for the 2023 NFL Draft. But those four positions just so happen to have a common thread this year.

They are the Chiefs’ most obvious needs.

While we can debate the order of the four — I’ve argued it’s tackle, wide receiver, defensive tackle and edge rusher — it’s harder to debate those are the top-four overall.

It will so rarely work out this way — the marriage between positional value in NFL Drafts and the Chiefs’ most immediate needs. Most years will require the team to pick between the two or at least balance them. It’s something of good fortune, perhaps, they can opt out of that decision.

Well, they must opt out of that decision.

The Chiefs have thrown the curveball before — general manager Brett Veach has picked in the first round only three times (with two of those picks coming last spring), and he used one on a running back that has been much closer to bust than boom. It’s a rare miss for a front office that has drafted well, to be fair, but the miss was on the positional choice just as much as the player choice.

And that mistake would be even more glaring Thursday. If the Chiefs were to deviate from those four positions, they’d not only be ignoring the historical evidence of positional values, but they’d also be shifting outside their own needs to do it. It would be a hard one to explain, in other words.

There are other positions in this draft that are deeper than the four we’ve covered — tight end and cornerback are probably atop that list. But the Chiefs can take advantage of those classes in the middle or later rounds of the draft, when they can truly move to best-player-available, regardless of position.

On Thursday, though?

Stick with the fastball.

This story was originally published April 25, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The Chiefs have thrown curveballs at the NFL Draft. Why that’d be a mistake this week."

Sam McDowell

The Kansas City Star

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Sam McDowell is a columnist for The Star who has covered Kansas City sports for more than a decade. He has won national awards for columns, features and enterprise work. The Headliner Awards named him the 2024 national sports columnist of the year.