When Brett Veach followed Andy Reid to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2013, he accepted a position as the team’s “pro and college personnel analyst,” a vague, undefined front‑office role that doubled as a blank canvas, a dream job for an upwardly mobile football scout. Veach worked under general manager John Dorsey, an archetypal football grunt with a general’s baritone voice and a habit of wearing the same gray sweatshirt, and Chris Ballard, a handsome, well‑coiffed director of pro personnel with a bright future. Veach did a little of everything—college scouting, pro personnel work; the job description was basically Let’s see what you got—but above all else, he watched tape of football players.
If you think you understand how much tape football scouts consume in a given year, you’re almost certainly wrong. It is an astonishing, astounding, almost sickening amount. When Dorsey came to Kansas City, the organization’s scouts spent the seventeen days before the NFL Scouting Combine watching tape of college players— marathon sessions that began at 5 a.m. and sometimes lasted late into the evening, like a training camp for scouts. Dorsey was the type of football man who believed that salvation could be found through film work, that if you couldn’t discern an answer about a player on tape, it probably didn’t exist. In the old scout’s view, the only way to find talent—the only way to build a championship roster that could win a Super Bowl—was to grind tape, three, four, five games at a time, so much tape that if you looked up at the clock and realized five hours had passed and your brain wasn’t completely numb, well, maybe you were onto something. This is what happened to Brett Veach one day in early 2016.
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