Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach was not taking any chances on Day 2 of the 2018 NFL draft, after failing to trade up into the first round of the draft on Thursday. Veach, who said that he made several calls on Thursday to try and move into the first round, was busy making deals on Friday, trading up twice to take the DE/DT of Ole Miss, Breeland Speaks and DT of Florida State, Derrick Nnadi.
Veach said on Friday, “If you were to ask me what were the odds of me getting into round one, I would’ve said very low. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. We certainly had dialogue from 27-31, 32ish we had dialogue. Again, it has to make sense for us both now and in the future. So when you’re talking about multiple picks or when you’re talking getting into ’19 picks, it’s something we weren’t interested in doing.”
To grab Speaks, Kansas City traded up to the 46th pick during the second round. The Chiefs traded their No. 54 and No. 78 pick to the Cincinnati Bengals in exchange for the No. 46 and No. 100 picks to move up. During the NFL combine, Speaks, who is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 283 pounds, clicked in a 4.87 second on the 40-yard dash. He had seven sacks and 61 total tackles in the last season as a junior for the Rebels.
Mel Kiper Jr., the ESPN draft expert, has highly spoken of Speaks in the leadup to the draft and said during a recent conference call that Speaks was dynamic at Ole Miss and was unblockable in the games this year against A&M, LSU, Mississippi State and Texas.
