A contingent of media swarmed the middle stage inside the Indianapolis Convention Center, the precursor for a barrage of questions to one of football’s best stories.
To a nearby stage walked the general manager of another team, and he stared out toward a much smaller crowd.
Brett Veach, the Chiefs’ general manager, entered the NFL scouting combine in a different role this year — the side attraction, not the main feature.
The Chiefs are a 6-11 team, not coming off a Super Bowl win or at least a Super Bowl appearance.
It has changed their attention here in Indianapolis — but it’s also changed the past several weeks back in Kansas City. The Chiefs have not been preparing for a game every week but rather evaluating why there’s been no game for which to prepare.
The top answer? “Certainly,” Veach said Tuesday, “we need to get more explosive in the running game.”
It hits at an interesting dilemma confronting the Chiefs over this offseason. Their most obvious problem a year ago was the running game — even their most obvious path to helping Patrick Mahomes — but what follows is a much less obvious solution.
The running back spot is not a position to which you want to allocate major resources. That’s not just my opinion but instead a fact of certain teams over the last decade: Super Bowl winners. Since 2013, no Super Bowl champion has spent more than 2% of its salary cap on a running back.
If the Chiefs spend a significant amount of free agent dollars on a running back — which they don’t have, by the way — it would require bucking a trend to get back to where they’ve been three times this decade. Similarly, if they use the No. 9 overall pick on, say, Notre Dame star running back Jeremiyah Love, they’d be doing it at the expense of more premium positions that they also need.
“Some of those more premium positions — interior D-line, edge rushers — they’re hard to find,” Veach said. “The problem with those guys is they’re hard to find, and then they don’t really become available in free agency. Some of those other positions, they’re good players, (but) you’ll probably eventually get a chance to get some of those positions in free agency.
“That’s the thing you just have to go through and weigh out all of the options.”
