War Room

by Michael Holley

  It’s one of the reasons the Steelers, whom Blank respected for their stability, hadn’t been without a first-round pick since 1967. For better or worse, whether Hall of Famer or bust or in between, they had made their first-round picks practically every year the Falcons had been in existence. On draft day 2003, as the Falcons sat out the first round, the Steelers traded up to spot 16 for USC safety Troy Polamalu; the Falcons, with less draft capital after the trade for Price, were locked into spot 55 and took Penn State safety Bryan Scott.

  There was more than the obvious numerical gap between picks 16 and 55. It was symbolic of the chasm that existed between one of the NFL’s most stable football factories, in Pittsburgh, and a football operation in Atlanta whose long-term thoughts were akin to quotes on a daily calendar: It says one thing on the first, so you go in that direction, and if it says something completely different on the second, you happily contradict your path and go there. For the Falcons to become the football version of Home Depot, Blank was going to have to find a personnel man who could change the thinking from day-to-day and season-to-season to something greater, more thoughtful, and more permanent. Bad luck wasn’t keeping the Falcons from back-to-back winning seasons. Bad thinking was.

  In 2003, Blank was still five years away from meeting Thomas Dimitroff, who was going into his second draft with the Patriots. Dimitroff was thirty-six, the same age Blank was when he began to give definition to the thought of Home Depot. From afar, based on nothing but appearances and pop-culture stereotyping, both men could easily have been mistaken for something they weren’t. Blank, sixty-one, believed in risk-taking just as much as the cycling and snowboarding scout did, if not more. Dimitroff, perceived as the anything-goes hippie, believed that the key to a strong organization was “clearly defined, indisputable roles” as well as unmistakable leadership. They put different flourishes and accents on their big ideas, a borough echoing from one man and Boulder from the other, but the ideas in many cases were identical.

  If you believe in karma, people meet when or if they are supposed to, so Blank and Dimitroff weren’t ready for each other in August 2003. Blank still didn’t have a GM, but what bothered him and all of Atlanta more was that he didn’t have a quarterback. Vick broke his right fibula in a preseason game, and the most optimistic news was that he’d miss just six weeks. That seemed ambitious when Vick showed up at a press conference seemingly mummified in a black cast. He was going to be out for a while, and Reeves was going to learn what it was like to build a franchise around a quarterback who’s not able to play.

  When the NFL season started, the Falcons didn’t start with it. They won their first game, lost their next seven, won one more, and then lost the next three. At 2–10, the future didn’t look good for Reeves. After missing the first twelve games, Vick returned in December against Carolina. He played as if the broken leg had been a publicity stunt. The Panthers would wind up in the Super Bowl, against the Patriots, but they had no defense for Vick. He looked as quick as normal, if not quicker. He threw for 179 yards and ran for 141 more.

  Anyone from Panthers coach John Fox to defensive end Julius Peppers could tell you what an athlete he was, but it wasn’t just athleticism that led thousands of people and dozens of corporate sponsors to the Georgia Dome. He was a stylist and a showman, as much as local musicians Usher and Cee Lo Green were. He was as much a home-run hitter as Chipper Jones was. And he sparked passionate debates about categorizing, great quarterback or great athlete, as much as any stance-taking politician could. What he couldn’t do, as Reeves learned after win number three, was save jobs. The coach knew that Blank was going to fire him at the end of the year, so he asked to leave with three regular-season games remaining.

  It didn’t take long for Blank to finally get his GM, Tampa’s McKay, who was also team president. It was a good hire. McKay was smart, respected around the league, and had presided over a Super Bowl winner with the 2002 Buccaneers. But, no disrespect to McKay, some scouts had exasperated sighs when given the news.

  Another system?

  Another head coach?

  What’s it going to be this time?

  McKay was schooled in the Tampa 2, a 4–3 defense that doesn’t work unless the middle linebacker can run like a defensive back and the defensive ends can fly to the quarterback. Defensive backs primarily play zone to prevent big plays. Essentially, scouting for the Tampa 2 is a lot different from scouting for the 3–4 that Reeves and Phillips taught. McKay hired Jim Mora, the younger, to be his head coach, and Mora promised to do something that Reeves never wanted to: put Vick in a specific system and see if he could thrive in it. When McKay brought in longtime personnel man Tim Ruskell to be assistant general manager, a scouting system was in place, too.

  No matter what the stats revealed, Michael Vick wouldn’t be able to be better in Atlanta than he was in 2004. He was still that rare artist, a pianist who could play a Steinway beautifully without studying it. He was also living a bit of a double life, and in 2004 no one had begun to chip away at it yet. The Falcons won eleven games in the first year of McKay-Mora and advanced to the conference championship before losing to Philadelphia.

  The franchise revolved around Vick as an athlete and marketer. When he was in the Falcons’ offices in Flowery Branch, Vick was comfortable. He talked about his interest in wine and being on his boat in Chesapeake Bay. If employees had their kids around, he would strike up conversations and sign autographs. But as much as he painted as he saw fit on the field, he did the same in his personal life. He worked on his game on his own terms, which was not much. He kept company with petty criminals from Newport News, Virginia, his hometown. Reeves knew he had some issues when the Falcons drafted him, but no one knew the extent. Yet the Falcons knew that he had to be monitored and worked with, long before his life started to fall apart, because there were far too many problematic signs.

  “We were cool. Obviously there were no hints of the slovenliness that he would eventually admit to,” says Darryl Orlando Ledbetter, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution sportswriter who covered Vick on the Falcons beat. “I never got the sense from him that he was ever committed to being great. He always thought his athletic ability would bail him out of everything. And you know, whether it was Virginia Tech or the Falcons, he always had somebody running behind him, trying to clean up the mess that he or his friends had left.”

  It was no coincidence that as glimpses of Vick’s private life began to be revealed to the public, one layer at a time, the Falcons began to sink with him. Only in hindsight does anyone mention that the organization had an in-house replacement available with a third-round pick from McKay’s first Falcons draft, quarterback Matt Schaub. Fans would have never forgiven the franchise if it had picked Schaub over Vick. Instead, the Falcons braced for the public-relations hits and prepared press releases, having no idea what they were actually protecting and defending.

  During the 2004 season, when everyone was paying attention to the field, two of Vick’s friends had been entangled in the case of a stolen Rolex at the Atlanta airport. The case didn’t receive a lot of coverage. In April 2005, a woman who described herself as Vick’s ex-girlfriend sued him for knowingly giving her a sexually transmitted disease. He never told her that he was infected with genital herpes and, according to the lawsuit, used the alias “Ron Mexico” to receive treatment. The case was settled out of court a year later. “That whole situation was a by-product of thinking that you’re above the law,” Ledbetter says. “And now the young woman has health problems for life.”

  In November 2006, after the Falcons lost at home to New Orleans, Vick responded to hecklers by twice holding up his middle finger. He was fined $20,000 and apologized repeatedly the next day in a press conference. He was unraveling and so were the Falcons. They went 2–6 in the second half of 2005 and finished 8–8. They were 7–9 in 2006, one of the reasons Mora lost his job. Ten days after former Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino was settling into the position vacated by Mora, in January 2007,
there was yet another Vick airport incident, this time in Miami. He tried to get a twenty-ounce water bottle past security, but it was confiscated and initially tossed into a recycling bin. It was quickly retrieved when Vick seemed to show a special interest in it. The bottle had a hidden compartment that smelled of marijuana. He was cleared a few days later when the tested bottle showed no marijuana traces.

  Finally, the biggest secret of all was exposed four days before the 2007 draft. Police raided a property owned by Vick in Virginia and found evidence of a dogfighting operation. There was a federal raid in July, and a week before the Falcons opened training camp, Vick and three others (including Quanis Phillips, one of the friends from the Rolex incident at the airport) were indicted by a federal grand jury. They faced charges ranging from dogfighting to interstate gambling. The more news that trickled out, the worse Vick looked. Dogs had been trained to fight to kill if necessary, and when they could not perform, they were killed by their owners. Vick and others were linked to sickening acts, accused of either shooting, drowning, or hanging the dogs when there was no longer any use for them. When the story first broke, Vick told his employers that he wasn’t involved and that his name would be cleared. Those in denial believed him, but as one Falcons employee put it, “They’re not going to be on the world news indicting you one day and then the next wake up and say, ‘Oh, by the way, we got this wrong.’”

  When training camp started, the emphasis was on the word “camp”: The animal-rights camp, with outraged activists, was on one side; the Vick camp, with supporters wearing his jerseys, was on another; and above all an airplane flew with a sign that read NEW TEAM NAME: DOG KILLERS.

  Vick was down, so that meant the franchise was, too. Everyone was going to have to start over. For Vick, that meant nearly two years of prison time. For Petrino, it meant going back to college, because a franchise without Vick was not what he had signed up for. For Atlanta it meant learning how to trust, once again, a franchise that took more than it gave. And for Blank, going into his sixth season of ownership, it meant going back in time.

  He didn’t know what Home Depot would become in 1978, but at least he knew what was being put into it. There were no surprises in the foundation. He knew how much time and thought he had put into making it work, how Bernie Marcus had spent his fiftieth birthday stocking the shelves himself at night, sweating profusely because he wanted to save money and not run the air conditioning when there were no customers in the building. That was real. What Blank tried to build on with the Falcons was a fraud. How could you build something great with a superstar who has shameful blood on his hands while you have your own sweat on yours? How can you be a partner with someone whose time and energy is spent establishing another “company,” not the one that gave him stardom and wealth and a platform in the first place? Blank was going to have to go back to the time when the Home Depot was an idea and not a building. It was a few men who depended on one another, guys who thought nothing of getting their hands dirty and bringing a great idea to life, one nail at a time.

  The first e-mail came from Bernie Marcus, which was a bit of a surprise because as Blank says, “He never writes e-mails. He has a computer, and I think he’s just learning to turn it on.” The next e-mail came from Pat Farrah, another Home Depot cofounder. “When it came to merchandising, Pat would think of fifty ideas, and forty-eight would drive me directly into bankruptcy. But the other two were so brilliant that nobody would ever think of them. And if you did those two and did them well, you were going to put yourself years ahead of everybody else.”

  The e-mails were reminders of how good business was supposed to look and feel. They reminded Blank, who was at the low point of his ownership, to think about what had worked in the past before rushing forward with a plan to remake the Falcons. He listened to his friends and former partners and began the process of interviewing several coaching and GM candidates in person. One of the candidates, Bill Parcells, did him a huge favor, although it probably didn’t feel that way at the time.

  Parcells was in place as the next Atlanta football czar. If it had been a wedding, Parcells and the Falcons would have already exchanged rings and been close to the “If anyone has any objections to this union…” stage. The deal fell apart, and Parcells went to Miami.

  It would have been a splash to have Parcells in Atlanta, but would it have been the right move? He could build a team quickly and bring legitimacy, but he could also be there for three years. Or one. It would have been yet another temporary solution, and besides, it was too easy. Anybody can point out the best football minds who have already had decades of success. It’s harder, but more rewarding, to find a team builder for the next generation. It might be someone whose name doesn’t sell tickets, but the quality teams he puts together does.

  By late 2007 and in January 2008, Blank had heard from and met with dozens of candidates. Nothing clicked for him like the webcam interview with Thomas Dimitroff did. When the interview ended, Blank wasn’t the only one convinced that the Falcons had found a franchise fixer. Dean Stamoulis, who represented independent recruiting consultant Russell Reynolds and took notes during all the Falcons interviews, said Dimitroff’s performance was the best of them all. Through his work at Russell Reynolds, Stamoulis had sat in on dozens of interviews around the country and world, trying to help corporations find leaders or retain them. As soon as Dimitroff appeared on the webcam screen, Stamoulis began writing.

  Offbeat look, he wrote. What’s with the hair?

  Dimitroff’s brown hair was long and at the top it appeared to be teased and moussed. He often made fun of his look, calling himself Jimmy Neutron, the Nickelodeon cartoon character with the same hairstyle. Mindful of Dimitroff’s love for Boulder and the city’s agreeable and laid-back reputation, Stamoulis also wrote, We may want to get this guy drug-tested.

  After a few minutes, Stamoulis, who has a background in industrial and organizational psychology, saw beneath the superficial surface and found what he considered to be Dimitroff’s brilliance. It wasn’t just that the GM-to-be effortlessly quoted Thoreau as he was making a point about football. He was able to show his smarts and flexibility by talking about the game of football for a few minutes and then showing an understanding of football business ten minutes later. Stamoulis made a flurry of notes: Able to see the big picture… Clearly smart … amazing focus on detail … amazing rigor… Profoundly driven… Get the feeling that he has a mental model for what the job is and has spent a lot of time thinking it through.

  “You had to be intelligent, and you had to be able to present your ideas in an intelligent manner. Arthur had been used to dealing with Rich, so you’re dealing with a smart person who is used to hearing smart football people,” says Les Snead, the Falcons pro personnel director who was part of the GM search committee. “You couldn’t just be ‘the Old Football Guy.’ You know what I mean? Thomas came off as intelligent, organized, clear, and there was an innovative side to him. I don’t think Arthur Blank’s ever worried about, ‘Hey, this guy can do a toe-side turn on a snowboard.’ If anything, Arthur kind of likes people like that.”

  Dimitroff got the job and headed to Atlanta. His temporary home was the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, close to Blank’s family office. When Dimitroff went to the office one day to interview a coaching candidate, Mike Smith, he had an experience similar to the Web interview. Talking about football philosophy was easy and fun with the Jacksonville defensive coordinator, and it made the two men lose track of time. Blank opened the door several times to check on them and they’d alternate saying, “Just give us a few more minutes.” A few more minutes would become forty-five minutes here, an hour there. The two had never formally met, but they saw too many things the same way. Smith was a natural leader, the son of schoolteachers and the oldest of eight children. He was a football guy to his core, but with his silver hair and effortless grin he looked like a more muscular version of the comedian Steve Martin. He and Dimitroff could have spent the whole day talking schem
es and players if they wanted, since both of them had devoted so much of their lives to the game, but they were more interested in talking about building. If football was such a critical part of their lives, why not figure out how to build an organization that would allow them to enjoy football, in one place, for years?

  Dimitroff had been imagining his ideal football environment for most of his professional life. It amused him when he would be in a football crowd and get strange looks for something he wore or something he said. Scott Pioli knew him better than most, so he could get away with calling him “Eurotrash” for his trendy clothing style. But he knew there was a real belief among many in the league that credible football people were supposed to look or sound a certain way, which is like everyone else. It was an odd dynamic that existed among coaches and personnel people: Everyone wanted to win a Super Bowl, which separates you from the pack; yet if you were perceived as too separate from the pack in your pursuit of winning, it drew scoffs.

  “I know there was a time with certain people, there was a whole self-righteous perception thing from people toward me,” Dimitroff says. “And that was not it at all. I never, ever, proselytized about my vegan diet, or my approach, or my environmental bent. Never. Only to people who were interested in talking about it. I was very mindful of that. And you know, a lot of people knew my dad in the business. And on the ribbing side, they would often say, ‘In so many ways, you’re like your father … but in other ways, you’re so not like your dad.’