The Chiefs’ future changed just before midnight Thursday, and it potentially changed drastically, but we’re going to start with a story I’ve told in the past.

With a new perspective on it now.

It comes from a week or so after the Super Bowl loss, when general manager Brett Veach conversed with head coach Andy Reid, and a solution for the team’s biggest position of need — left tackle — hit him like a epiphany.

“Just sucking for a year,” Veach said, “and picking in the top 10.”

A joke, of course.

But the Chiefs just implemented their solution in a serious way:

Grow comfortable with risk.

The Chiefs drafted Ohio State left tackle Josh Simmons at No. 32 overall, closing out the opening round of the NFL Draft on Thursday.

They graded Simmons as a top-10 talent — you know, before he suffered a season-ending, non-contact patella injury in his knee in October.

The Chiefs feel good about how he is healing — that he will not only be ready for training camp in late July in St. Joseph, but that he’ll first be able to get in some work in Kansas City over the summer.

That’s the best-case scenario following Simmons’ surgery, as head trainer Rick Burkholder framed it in a conversation with Veach, who summed up the situation by saying, “I just put my trust in Rick.”

Make no mistake, though: This is a risk. It’s the sort of injury that some believe can prompt players to become more susceptible to future injuries. Add to that, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported Thursday that other teams shied away from Simmons because of maturity concerns.

And, look, we can’t pretend as though the Chiefs’ medical staff is privy to some magical MRI imaging that the rest of the league does not possess.

Simmons doesn’t fall to 32 absent the whatabouts. He is the most athletic offensive tackle in a draft in which half the league could use one, but he was still available at the back end of the first round for a reason.

The importance here isn’t that the Chiefs found a way to erase the risk.

It’s why they’re the team to take it.

And that comes with the most simple answer: Because they can.

At the onset of each offseason, Veach instructs his front office to ignore the looming draft and treat free agency as though it’s their only way to improve the team. They have fewer gaps to fill than most. That helps.

They intentionally put themselves in a position to think luxury over immediate need, and that’s a real advantage — but only if you seize it.

Really, it would have been fathomable to check the left tackle box a month before the draft — they already spent more money on left tackle Jaylon Moore during free agency than literally any other offseason addition.

It might have even been fathomable to look at their own recent track record in drafts and determine that Veach’s joke was spot-on — if you can’t pick in the top 10, you’re grasping for a left tackle.

But those two lessons actually reinforce the other side of the point: It’s too damn hard to get a left tackle.

If a top-10 talent is there — even with risk — you pounce.

Because you can.

And because there hasn’t been another way.

Simmons played in 5 1/2 games last fall at Ohio State and allowed only one pressure. The Buckeyes’ better opponents awaited after the injury, as he stood on the sideline, but still. He has talent. The league won’t disagree with that.

Or even this: The Chiefs maybe got a steal.

The Chiefs are in a spot to take that “maybe.”

Simmons has the cliche boom-or-bust potential, more than know-what-you’re-getting reliability from, say, George Karlaftis and Trent McDuffie a few years earlier. The Chiefs can better survive a bust than most. They’ve done it before.

And at a premium position of this much importance — of which they need no reminders —the payoff for the boom is far greater.

A team possessing a championship window that’s open as long as Patrick Mahomes is in town just locked up a player occupying the second-most important position in football on a four-year rookie deal with a team option for a fifth.

The only way you get everything out of everything else you have — Patrick Mahomes included — is if they have time to actually do the job. Time to maximize their ability. Mahomes, as Veach put it, is the most important player in the sport.

A left tackle has been the missing ammunition to return him to being the gunslinger we once knew.

The Chiefs’ stop-gap provisions have derived from necessity, not from preference. That includes Jaylon Moore.

The pick Thursday comes from luxury.

They earned it.

This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM.