Brett Veach Discusses Pandemic Cap Situations — 'We Have a Plan'
While it may have been a little bit too close to the deadline for comfort before the Kansas City Chiefs signed star defensive tackle Chris Jones, General Manager Brett Veach says it was all a matter of time.
In a video conference with reporters announcing the re-signing of the Chiefs’ star d-lineman, Veach explained why this contract negotiation took longer than others.
“I go back to [Chiefs reporter BJ Kissel]'s question about being surprised, and my statement was ‘we weren’t surprised, it just took longer.’ Adam [Teicher], to your question, that’s really why this took some time, because we were trying to go through all the scenarios.”
As the pandemic begins to impact the NFL, The New York Times found the league could potentially lose “between $2 billion and $4 billion” in revenue if fans are not at stadiums this season. This would create lower salary caps in future years.
With the pending scenarios, Veach said he is prepared no matter what.
“We don’t know where the cap is going to be, but we have to have plans ready in place for whether it grows, stays the same, it dips, what levels, what we need to do, what moves do we have to make,” Veach said. “We have a plan, and we’ll be able to go in some different areas, but once we got to a level where we felt comfortable over the next few years that we have enough game-planning in place to protect ourselves, then we felt good.”
During the negotiation, Jones sent a series of tweets that sent fear into Chiefs Kingdom, but after the deal was done, Veach said he had no doubts during the process.
“The whole time we felt confident that something would get done, we just needed to go through, we waited for as much information as we could get and then at a certain point, once we felt pretty good about our set-up for the short- and long-term, then we were able to pull the trigger,” Veach said.
