Jason Licht doesn’t remember how much time Brett Veach spent in his office back then, nor did either guy think much of it at the time. Licht was a top lieutenant for then Eagles GM Tom Heckert. Veach was working as Eagles boss Andy Reid’s personal assistant and hadn’t even begun to think he’d wind up on a scouting track—he was just there to get his start in coaching, trying to soak up as much football as he could.
Back then, Veach spent as much time around Reid as anyone in the building. And his pattern was, when he’d get a minute from the head coach, to retreat to Licht’s space.
“Brett came in. He’d have 1,000 questions a day,” Licht said, on a Zoom call with his old friend Veach on Wednesday afternoon. “ At that point, Andy was grooming him, unintentionally maybe, to [rise to] the position that he’s at right now. He was always a very good evaluator. We had a lot of arguments too, over players. He loved to argue. He wasn’t somebody where I could say, ‘No, I think you’re wrong. I like this guy.’
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“I was always in Jason’s office,” Veach said. “It would’ve been so easy for Jason to be like,. Jason’s always had his door open for me. He was so influential in my career. Just learning the game in all different aspects. I knew nothing about scouting. I mean, watching tape is a very small part of it. Roster composition, broad-term thinking, my first exposure to the actual scouting process was in Licht’s office.
“Where I used to sit, he was right down the hall,” Veach said. “I would stop down there all the time. And I was just trying to accumulate as much knowledge as I could.”
A little more than a decade later, Licht is the GM of one Super Bowl team and Veach is the GM of the other. The former’s Buccaneers will take on the latter’s defending champion Chiefs in Licht’s new home city Sunday.
Yes, this is a story about the two of them. But it’s also another story about Reid and the impact he’s had on people across the NFL. You know about Ron Rivera, John Harbaugh, Doug Pederson, Sean McDermott and Reid’s coaching tree. You may not know that, just the same, he has grown an impressive family of rising young executives in the sport, too.
Super Bowl LV, in fact, is shining proof of it.
