College football players who are good enough to turn pro are increasingly choosing to stay in college, where their NIL paychecks can rival what they\u2019d be making in the NFL.<\/p>\n
Chiefs General Manager Brett Veach said now that the NCAA allows players to make money off their names, images and likenesses, players aren\u2019t entering the draft because of the money they can make in college. Veach said that the Chiefs already had an early version of their draft board set before the deadline for players to enter the draft, and a large proportion of the Chiefs\u2019 top prospects decided to stay in college.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the official decision date for the underclassmen came, I believe we moved over 25 guys off our board that we had Top 75, Top 100,\u201d Veach said. \u201cSo it\u2019s really impacts, I think, the draft, and then you\u2019re getting older, older prospects as you go on. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to change any time soon and I think that\u2019s something we have to adapt to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chiefs are now finding that the draft is dominated by older players who have fully exhausted their NCAA eligibility \u2014 meaning they\u2019ll be drafting some players who are older than players currently on the Chiefs\u2019 roster.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see their birth dates and then you look at the roster and a lot of our guys are as young as these guys,\u201d Veach said.<\/p>\n
Veach said where he really sees it is on Day 2 of the draft, which used to have a lot of talented prospects who hadn\u2019t played a lot of college football. Those players are typically transferring to other schools now rather than moving to the NFL.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically, the second and third round would be those guys that maybe they didn\u2019t play a lot, but they were young,\u201d he said. \u201cWell, now these guys are just bouncing and getting paid by another school and getting paid and playing. So Round 2, 3, 4, the younger developmental guys who haven\u2019t scratched the surface yet, you\u2019re getting more finished product so that\u2019s challenging, but that\u2019s what we have to adapt to and how we position our board.\u201d<\/p>\n
The transfer portal and NIL have fundamentally changed college football. Which means they\u2019ve fundamentally changed the NFL draft as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"College football players who are good enough to turn pro are increasingly choosing to stay in college, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-491609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}