Veach’s Reaches and Steals

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner.

The 2023 NFL draft has come and gone, and every team has a bunch of shiny new players on their teams. The Chiefs are no different. They came into the draft with 10 selections, and exited the draft with 7 new players. They traded up three times and traded back (into 2024!) once.

There are already several articles on the KCSN substack that are introductions to the rookie class, or full film reviews. I highly recommend checking them out. In this article, I’m not going to be talking about the actual players we picked so much as the process by which we picked them.

Every pick the Chiefs made in this draft was a moderate to severe reach based on the consensus board through the first 5 rounds. Keondre Coburn was the consensus ranked 176^th best prospect, and was taken at 194. Nic Jones was taken 20 spots earlier than his ranking, but that means very little in the seventh round.

If you’re wondering why I bring up the Consensus board, it’s two-fold. First, it’s a pretty accurate barometer of where players are going to go. Outside of the top 15 picks, which have a lot of noise, there’s an 80% chance that a player will be gone by his consensus rank at any given point in the draft. So 40 of the top 50 players will be gone by pick 50. 80 of the top 100 will be gone by pick 100.