More than five years into the NIL era, it continues to affect the NFL Draft. But Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach showed just how much it impacted his team this cycle.

Veach told reporters the Chiefs took upward of 25 names off their draft board when the underclassmen list came out in January. For the 2026 NFL Draft, only 63 underclassmen forwent their eligibility and declared. It continued a trend of underclassmen opting to stay in school now that they can earn NIL dollars and hopefully improve their stock.

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To Veach, NFL teams simply have to “adapt” to when it comes to college football’s new landscape. It also means franchises are drafting older players. That means the development plans also need adjusting.

“You see it when we go through these prospects and we’re looking at the tags and you see their birth dates, and then you look at your roster, and a lot of the guys are just as young as these guys,” Veach said at the NFL Scouting Combine. “Then, it kind of trickles down. … I think when the official decision date for these underclassmen came out, I believe we moved over 25 guys off our board that we had top 75, top 100.

“So it really impacts, I think, the draft, and then you’re getting older prospects as you go on. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, and that’s something that we have to adapt to. Until there’s some wholesale changes on what they do on the college side, I think this is just going to be the way things work now. And it’s for us to adapt and adjust to it and position yourself to get some of the younger players that have a little more growth.”

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Brett Veach: Middle rounds hit hardest by NIL era

NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah recently said it will probably take time to see just how much of an impact NIL and the transfer portal have on the draft. But as more players go back to school and get another year of development, the approach to the second and third round is shifting.

Now, Brett Veach said players drafted in those rounds don’t necessarily need as much work. That’s also part of the transformation of the process.

“Typically, the second and third round would be those guys that maybe they didn’t play a lot, but they were young,” Veach said. “Well, now these guys are just bouncing and getting paid by another school and getting paid and playing. So it’s a little bit that two, three, four rounds where you’ve got these younger, developmental guys that haven’t scratched the surface yet, you’re getting a little bit more already finished product.

“That’s challenging. But I think it’s, again, what we have to adapt to, and that goes into how you position your board and when to be aggressive and when not to be aggressive.”