SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. − This was late on a Friday night at a budget hotel in Orono, Maine in 2002, when Joe Bleymaier was a redshirt freshman at the University of Delaware and Brett Veach was a graduate assistant.
The Blue Hens had a noon game the next day against the University of Maine. But Veach and Bleymaier were up until about 2 a.m., well past final bed-check, clearly violating curfew.
No, they hadn’t snuck out to go to a nearby bar, or a club.
This is what they were doing:
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“We were watching WAC football on ESPN, and Veach would stay up with me,” Bleymaier said about the Western Athletic Conference.
Why WAC games on a Friday night? Bleymaier’s father, Gene, was Boise State’s athletic director at the time. And their games were often featured as the late game.
And as Bleymaier described it, Veach was “a football junkie.”
“We’d be watching it together, and (Veach) would know all the players in the WAC,” Bleymaier said. “I knew many of them because I grew up with them, so I’d be like, ‘How do you know those WAC football players?’ But his mind was always working. He just saw them and remembered, ‘Oh yeah, the guy from Hawaii, the guy from Reno.’
“He knew everything about them. And I was like, the guy is either really weird or really smart.”
It turned out to be the latter. That’s because everything about those nights at UD road games to Maine, William & Mary, and James Madison that season led the two UD wide receivers to the Super Bowl.
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Veach is in the Super Bowl for the third time in four years as the general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs, who will face the Eagles on Sunday. Veach is the one who famously convinced head coach Andy Reid to trade up to draft generational quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the first round in 2017.
Beginning the next season, when Mahomes became the starting quarterback, the Chiefs have gotten at least as far as the AFC Championship game.
Veach has helped build the Chiefs into a perennial powerhouse with two other UD alums in Bleymaier, who is the Chiefs’ wide receivers coach; and Matt Nagy, the Chiefs’ quarterbacks coach.
Nagy and Veach were teammates at UD from 1998-2000. Nagy was the Hens’ star quarterback, setting more than 20 passing records at the time. Veach played running back and wide receiver.
“Matt and I were close at Delaware, and Joe actually came on when I was a GA, and we hit it off right away,” Veach said. “It’s awesome to see Matt and Joe and what they’ve done.
“There must be something in the water at Delaware.”
Starting as Eagles interns
Nagy and Veach didn’t stay up late watching west coast college football games while at Delaware. But they both knew the game well enough to know exactly where each would be on the field.
“We always had this great feel for each other,” Nagy said. “I knew he would always be in the right spot.”
Bleymaier was much the same way when he was at UD from 2002-05. He was a key component of UD’s national championship season in 2003.
And they have all paid their dues in climbing the coaching/scouting ladder to their current roles with the Chiefs.
Veach began in 2004 as a coaching intern with Reid and the Eagles. Nagy spent six seasons playing in the Arena Football League before becoming a summer intern with the Eagles in 2008. Bleymaier was a summer intern with the Eagles from 2007-09.
“I remember getting a phone call from Veach (in 2004), and he said, ‘Hey, I just got a call from Coach Reid, and he wants me to come interview with him as a possibility of getting in with the Eagles,'” Nagy said. “It blew me away because growing up in the Philadelphia area, and here’s Coach Reid calling Veach to get in (the profession), and he does get in.
“And then … a few years went by, and Veach calls me and says, ‘Hey, come do this internship in training camp.’ Once that happened, I was looking at it like a player. When I got into it as an intern in coaching, and I knew Veach was working his way up, that’s when we started thinking that this could be pretty cool down the road.”
By then, Reid had moved Veach to the scouting department, and soon after he made Nagy a quality control coach on offense. Bleymaier, meanwhile, went into business after his summer internship with the Eagles.
Bleymaier got back into coaching in 2013 as offensive quality control coach at the University of Colorado.
Moving to Kansas City
The Eagles had fired Reid after 14 seasons following the 2012 season, and he was quickly hired by the Chiefs. Reid took Veach with him as a pro and college football analyst before naming him co-director of player personnel in 2015.
Nagy came with Reid, too, and was named quarterbacks coach with Doug Pederson as the offensive coordinator.
When Pederson became the Eagles’ coach in 2016, Nagy replaced him as offensive coordinator. He served in that role in 2017, when Mahomes was a rookie sitting behind veteran Alex Smith. Then Nagy became the Bears’ head coach for four seasons before returning this season.
It was an easy decision for Nagy to return to the Chiefs as a quarterbacks coach.
“Brett, Coach Reid, Patrick, and being a part of that process when he got drafted,” Nagy said. “So all of us, just kind of being together, it felt like home. They welcomed me back with open arms, and it’s just been almost storybook … (Mahomes) has grown so much from his rookie year, and I’m just helping him in certain ways when I can.
“How lucky am I being able to coach Patrick? It’s pretty cool.”
In 2016, Bleymaier left Colorado and took the same role with the Chiefs. Bleymaier became the assistant quarterbacks in 2018 and moved to wide receivers coach in 2021.
Veach, meanwhile, became the general manager in 2017. Reid wanted someone he could trust in that role, thus enabling him to focus solely on football. When Reid was coaching the Eagles, he also had final say on personnel decisions.
That was still the case when Howie Roseman became Eagles’ general manager in 2010. But once Reid got to Kansas City, he wanted to focus solely on coaching. John Dorsey became the GM, and then Veach replaced him.
“It’s hard to do both,” Reid said last week about coaching and personnel decisions. “I’ve got guys around me that are really good. Brett Veach is really good. Dorsey was good. And so, let those guys do their job and then I’ll focus in on the football part.
“I enjoy that part.”
Late-night scouting
But let’s get back to Veach and Bleymaier and those hotel lobbies watching WAC football two decades ago.
Before those games, Gene Bleymaier would talk about Boise State’s opponent.
“My dad would say, ‘This guy is really tough to tackle in the open field, so we really gotta try to wrap him up,’” Bleymaier said. “Then Veach and I would be watching the game, and Veach would say, ‘Hey, that running back from Hawaii is really tough to tackle in the open field.’
“And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I know, that’s what the coaches told my dad. How did you know that?’”
That’s still the case.
Last spring, Veach traded the Chiefs’ best wide receiver, Tyreek Hill, who had 1,239 yards receiving, to the Dolphins. His speed was instrumental in opening up the field for star tight end Travis Kelce.
But Hill wanted a contract in the $25-$30 million per year range, and the Chiefs had already signed Mahomes to a 10-year contract worth as much as $450 million. They also had high-priced veterans in Kelce, tackle Orlando Brown and defensive tackle Chris Jones.
Sure, maybe Veach could have restructured Hill’s contract to fit him under the NFL’s salary cap. Instead, he traded Hill to Miami for five draft picks − a first-rounder, second-rounder and fourth rounder in 2022, and a fourth and sixth-rounder in 2023. The Dolphins signed Hill to a four-year deal worth as much as $120 million.
Veach, meanwhile, used that money to sign lower-cost receivers Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Veach then drafted four of the Chiefs’ five starting defensive backs last spring in first-rounder Trent McDuffie, second-rounder Bryan Cook, fourth-rounder Joshua Williams and seventh-rounder Jaylen Watson. The four combined to play more than 2,000 snaps in 2022.
As a team, Chiefs rookies played more snaps than any other team.
This is how championship teams have to be built once a quarterback gets that extension. And the Eagles could face that as soon as next season if quarterback Jalen Hurts gets an extension in Mahomes’ salary range.
“When you have a talented roster like we do, you have to make some moves,” Veach said. “We’ve invested a lot of time in the scouting process … and it’s certainly gratifying for us knowing that the process that we have has worked.”
Revamping and sustaining
There is no easy way to do this. The NFL’s salary cap is designed for parity, to give every team a chance. That’s what makes these perennial championship runs all the more unlikely.
In many ways, the Chiefs aren’t supposed to be doing this, much like the Patriots weren’t supposed to win six Super Bowls during Tom Brady’s 20 seasons at quarterback. That includes a stretch beginning in 2012 when the Patriots were in seven straight AFC Championship games, winning three Super Bowls.
Veach knows that success begins and ends with the quarterback.
So Veach didn’t hesitate when he zeroed in on Mahomes, trading up to No. 12 in the first round of the 2017 draft when many projected him as a second-rounder. Then the Chiefs watched Mahomes blossom into a star, throwing for an NFL high 5,250 yards this season.
Mahomes, who played at Texas Tech, wasn’t a slam dunk star back then. But it was a validation of what Veach and Bleymaier did violating curfew during those late nights in Orono, Maine.
Veach continued that by revamping the roster over the years, all while keeping the Chiefs contending for Super Bowls.
“The quarterback, the head coach are the two factors that really determine your success, and your ability to sustain success,” Veach said. “So you’re going to exhaust every ounce of resources that you have (for Mahomes).
“We were all on the same page organizationally. We just made it a point to do whatever we had to do to get a guy like Pat.”
Contact Martin Frank at mfrank@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @Mfranknfl.
