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’d be making in the NFL.
Chiefs General Manager Brett Veach said now that the NCAA allows players to make money off their names, images and likenesses, players aren’t 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’ top prospects decided to stay in college.
“When 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,” Veach said. “So it’s really impacts, I think, the draft, and then you’re getting older, older prospects as you go on. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon and I think that’s something we have to adapt to.”
The Chiefs are now finding that the draft is dominated by older players who have fully exhausted their NCAA eligibility — meaning they’ll be drafting some players who are older than players currently on the Chiefs’ roster.
“You see their birth dates and then you look at the roster and a lot of our guys are as young as these guys,” Veach said.
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’t played a lot of college football. Those players are typically transferring to other schools now rather than moving to the NFL.
“Typically, the second and third round would be those guys that maybe they didn’t play a lot, but they were young,” he said. “Well, 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’t scratched the surface yet, you’re getting more finished product so that’s challenging, but that’s what we have to adapt to and how we position our board.”
The transfer portal and NIL have fundamentally changed college football. Which means they’ve fundamentally changed the NFL draft as well.
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