War Room

by Michael Holley

  “We all had given each other something that no one else could give us,” he says.

  It was why he could appreciate the meticulous craftsmanship and deep thought that was poured into some of the fine art that Dallas brought into their home, yet one of the pieces of art that stirred his soul was actually a football photo. He had purchased and framed it after his first visit to Arrowhead, in 1998. He had seen it as he walked through the press box, and he stared at it for the longest time, falling in love with the game again as he looked.

  The picture was taken on Christmas Day 1971. The Chiefs were playing the Dolphins in a marathon play-off game at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. Len Dawson, the “16” on his jersey still perfectly clean, was giving instructions in the huddle. Wendell Hayes’s pants were a combination of white, brown, and grass-stain green. Jim Tyrer’s helmet was scratched and had streaks of brown, yet he leaned in intensely, ready for more. Ed Podolak was exhausted, bent over with both hands on his knees.

  “I think it’s one of the great pictures in NFL history,” Pioli says. “It’s the essence of football.”

  Now he was off to Kansas City, to see if the essence of football could be re-created.

  8

  A Tale of Three Cities

  Scott Pioli had been in Kansas City for less than a month, and he already knew that his instincts in his job interview had been correct. On that long day in Dallas, when all subjects seemed to be fair game, Pioli had asked his interviewers if some of the problems with the Chiefs extended beyond the football field and into other areas of the organization. He had been too polite to answer the question himself that day, but now that he was one of them he could say it with authority.

  Yes.

  The Chiefs were officially a mess, and what happened on the field was just a representation of what was happening in parts of the office. He noticed things, big and small, that irritated him. He was no obsessive accounting guy, but he was practical and didn’t believe in wasting money. His conservative estimate was that he could save the Chiefs at least $10,000, easily, just by informing employees not to print everything in color. As for the majority of the team’s scouts, they either hadn’t asked some of their peers in New England what it was like to work for Pioli or the job wasn’t that important to them. Pioli had spent most of his career working for Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, and he was just as organized as they were, if not more. The scouts had to know that their reports would be scrutinized, that they would be required to give opinions and should be prepared to defend them, and that there would be very few moments to sit and do nothing.

  As Pioli began talking at his first gathering with the Chiefs’ scouts, he heard a bright chime from a laptop computer. It was hard for any of the scouts to hide in that situation. They were seated at a conference table, and everyone could see what everyone else was doing. Seconds after the laptop alert, one of the scouts began tapping away at his keyboard.

  “What are you doing?” Pioli asked.

  “I got an e-mail,” the scout replied, furrowing his brow. The only thing missing from the response was, “Duh!” He seemed annoyed that the boss even asked, and the other scouts reacted as if this type of behavior was normal in this setting. Pioli was too surprised to erupt. This group was going to need a strong talking-to, sooner rather than later.

  Shortly after, Pioli was watching film with the scouts in a darkened room. From his seat in front, he could hear giggling behind him. He turned around once, certain that a quick glare would send the message to knock off the nonsense. It didn’t. There was more laughter. He turned again and stared a couple seconds longer. Still, it was clear that a couple guys were distracted and amused by something else. Finally, he stopped the film and turned on the lights.

  “What’s on the computer? Turn it around so I can see it,” he said.

  A couple of sheepish scouts showed him the computer screen, which revealed a silly picture that had been making the rounds online. Pioli knew then that he had a couple of options: He could either ban laptops from scouting meetings, or he could find a bunch of new college scouts.

  There was too much work to be done in Kansas City for anyone to be feeling comfortable. Pioli had noticed that two scouts on his staff, Terry Delp and former Chiefs receiver Willie Davis, appeared to be curious and conscientious as they took notes and asked questions. Eventually, the scouting staff would be reshaped as radically as the team on the field, and Delp and Davis would be the only holdovers on the college side while Ray Farmer would stay as director of pro personnel. As for that team that had won two games the previous year, Pioli had mentioned something to Clark Hunt during the initial interview that got the owner’s attention.

  “He told me he could tell just from watching tape how out of shape the team was,” Hunt says. “No one had made the observation before. It’s always easy to look at the big guys and say they’re out of shape, but he pointed to all aspects of the team and identified conditioning as one of the problems. One thing about Scott is that he’ll always tell you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not, so I appreciated that.”

  It was one of the reasons he had to find a new head coach. Pioli kept his word to Hunt and considered retaining Herm Edwards, whom he liked personally. Everyone in the league had a good story to tell about the affable Edwards, who could probably win anyone’s Make a Fast Friend contest. But there needed to be a new voice and new direction with the players. Pioli took a week and a half to meet with Edwards and watch film, and then he made the decision to replace him. In early February 2009, two weeks after the dismissal of Edwards, Pioli hired Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator Todd Haley, a coach who was equally talented and brash.

  Haley grew up in Pittsburgh and was a preteen when Bradshaw-to-Swann was a staple of 1970s Super Bowls. He was in Pittsburgh because his father, Dick, was the ace personnel man of the Steeler dynasty. Todd lived for scouting trips with his dad. Dick Haley would take a mini tape recorder, wrap a game program around it, and sit in the stands as he uttered fragmented observations about players into the recorder. Todd would do whatever he could to help, whether it was writing things down or, a couple times during long scouting trips in Florida, driving the car so his father could take catnaps (Dick never told his wife, Carolyn, about that; Haley wasn’t legally able to drive when his father put him behind the wheel).

  Todd Haley’s football education resulted in a double major: He learned scouting from his father and was a young coach on Parcells’s all-star coaching staff with the Jets in the late 1990s. The coaches there included Belichick, Charlie Weis, and Romeo Crennel. Haley had an exceptional eye for detail, and he had a difficult time holding his tongue if he didn’t believe things were being done properly. As a thirty-one-year-old assistant who should have known better, he questioned one of Parcells’s motivational tactics. The Jets were 2–3, had an upcoming Monday-night game against the Patriots, and were practicing with a focus that underwhelmed their head coach. So Parcells instructed all coaches to follow him and left the players on the field to coach themselves. After a while, Haley, not understanding the classic Parcells mind game, piped up: “So we’re quitting? We’re giving up?” To which the quick-witted Parcells, referencing Haley’s love for and background in golf, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, we’re fucking quitting … just like you quit when you couldn’t golf.”

  The Jets beat the Patriots, won ten of their final eleven games, and went all the way to the conference championship game before losing to the Broncos. Lesson learned for the young Haley. Parcells liked him, though, and so did Pioli, who was the Jets’ player personnel director when Haley was there. Pioli believed that the young Chiefs could benefit from the knowledge and discipline that he expected Haley to bring.

  On Haley’s birthday, February 28, his boss had already put the bow on a thoughtful present. No one understood the Patriots’ salary cap, Belichick, and the art of making a deal with the coach better than Pioli. February 27 was the first day of free agency and the new league
year, so Pioli knew that if he wanted to pry Matt Cassel from the Patriots, he’d have to move fast and present a specific compensation package that Belichick would find attractive. Everyone knew Cassel had to be traded. Tom Brady’s rehab had gone well, and the Patriots were expecting him to return to health and his starting job in 2009. Thus Cassel was the only backup player in the league designated as his team’s franchise player. The Patriots had done that in early February to protect themselves from Cassel slipping away as an unrestricted free agent, but it meant the team had to commit $14 million to its backup quarterback.

  Pioli’s knowledge and hustle worked to his advantage. He’d heard rumors that his old colleague and new divisional rival, Josh McDaniels, was trying to construct a three-team deal that would net the Patriots a first-round pick and land Cassel in Denver. McDaniels was just thirty-two, but he already had tremendous power in Denver. There was a general manager, Brian Xanders, in place, but McDaniels had final say over the roster. Pioli was ready with a deal before McDaniels was and offered the Chiefs’ second-round pick, the third choice in the round, for Cassel and thirty-three-year-old linebacker Mike Vrabel. It was the first and smartest offer the Patriots received. Pioli understood that the Patriots were going to have to act quickly with Cassel so they could be players in free agency; he was aware that Belichick viewed the second round as the sweet spot in the upcoming draft; he knew how skeptical Belichick was of three-team trades; and he was one of the few people who realized that Vrabel, adored in New England, was most likely going to be cut due to his age and cap number.

  The deal went through and, officially, the Chiefs gained a starting quarterback while the Patriots traded one. But anyone who had been around the Patriots the previous eight seasons knew better. Vrabel was a quarterback, too, a leader in every way imaginable. He was advanced enough to know game plans as well as the coaches, yet he had enough jokester in him to interrupt tense team meetings with mock questions that would have Belichick laughing out loud. He was the only person on the team who could get away with that. He was a movie junkie with an encyclopedic memory, so he’d entertain his teammates by reciting one-liners that applied to whatever conversation they were having. He was the symbol of who the Patriots were, the godfather of the seemingly unremarkable free-agent class that helped engineer the upset of the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. Pro football is defined by seasonal job changes, but fans and teammates alike allowed themselves to believe that Vrabel would be an exception.

  “I’ve seen a lot of good football players leave here, but the Vrabel trade is the one that really got up underneath my skin,” says Vince Wilfork, a teammate for five seasons. “That trade ticks me off. Right now. Still. When I heard about it I said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ If you want to talk about the Patriot Way, you start with Vrabel. He’s smart. He’s great off the field. He knows what he’s doing on the field.

  “Let me tell you, if the play clock was running down and we didn’t have a play on defense, he gave us one. He didn’t look to the coaches for reassurances. He did it himself. He always knew what defense we could and couldn’t be in.”

  All those traits are why Pioli wanted him in Kansas City, even though Vrabel would be thirty-four by the first game of the regular season. Vrabel didn’t run as well as he used to, and his brain sometimes processed plays that his body could no longer make. But the Patriots were going to miss him and players like him. Even the Patriots’ system, perceived as diva-proof, would be challenged by its share of whiny and self-absorbed athletes who would carry some influence in the locker room. It was inevitable, and it’s exactly what Vrabel saw unfolding at times during the 2008 season. While the Patriots would spend 2009 in transition, searching to define their new identity, the Chiefs were going to be trying to learn the fundamentals of winning. Vrabel was going to help in the locker room with a style that wasn’t too heavy-handed or preachy. He was going to be able to show a young team how to think and act while also retaining an ability to be seen as one of the guys.

  Unfortunately for Pioli, he wasn’t going to be able to have Vrabel and Chiefs legend Tony Gonzalez in the same locker room. It wasn’t personal, but Gonzalez wanted out of town. He had been selected to nine Pro Bowls and was regarded as one of the best tight ends of all time, but he’d never won a play-off game in his career. He was the same age as Vrabel, and he wanted to switch places with him. Vrabel had come from a team that had won eleven games in 2008; the Chiefs hadn’t won eleven games the previous two seasons combined.

  Gonzalez had nearly done it all in his NFL career. He got open as well as anyone in the league. He supported his teammates, even when they said silly things, like the time former Chiefs quarterback Elvis Grbac criticized him during a postgame press conference and said he and others needed to start making some plays. Maybe Gonzalez let it slide because he saw the comedy in a quarterback who was personally responsible for three turnovers in that game calling someone else out. He was charitable. He was so concerned about connecting with the Latino community in Kansas City that he spent a month of vacation time in Mexico, taking Spanish classes and living with a family that didn’t speak English. When Carl Peterson was the leading man in football operations, Gonzalez’s dissatisfaction with the deal Peterson offered him went public, which is usually a PR nightmare for an athlete. But in the first-name game, people liked Tony much more than they liked Carl, so it was okay. Once, while having dinner in California, he even saved a choking Chargers fan’s life by giving him the Heimlich, even if he had only seen it done before on TV.

  The Chiefs obviously weren’t eager to trade him, and Pioli even met with him to sell him on the turnaround that was coming in Kansas City. Gonzalez determined that it was time to go, so eight weeks after acquiring Cassel and Vrabel, Pioli had to find a team that was willing to handsomely pay the tight end and the Chiefs. It wasn’t difficult. All he had to do was contact a friend of his, who was coming off a season in which he was named the league’s executive of the year. In voting among forty coaches, general managers, and personnel types, Thomas Dimitroff was recognized as the best in the league. Dimitroff didn’t see it as validation. He was looking for more than an eleven-win regular season and a first-round loss in the play-offs. But the award meant that the league had recognized the difficulty of what he had inherited and appreciated how he had turned a bad situation into a respectable one. Dimitroff was looking to add more unpredictability to the Falcons’ offense. He offered Pioli a second-round pick in 2010 and was prepared to hand Gonzalez the last big contract of his career. It was a deal. Gonzalez was off to a winner, and the new Chiefs were going to have to find their way without him.

  Meanwhile, Pioli was going to have to find a scouting staff that could be trained to converse in the same system he had known the previous nine seasons. He needed a staff that would be able to identify stars like Gonzalez, of course, but also players like Vrabel. While in New England, the linebacker was selected to just one Pro Bowl, but he was as important to the team’s success and psyche as anyone in the organization. Those types of players, talented and uncelebrated, fantasy football draft leftovers, could help win championships. Pioli was going to need a new director of college scouting to help him, someone with a knack for digging beneath the surface and seeing talent even when it’s not always obvious to everyone else. The perfect man for the job was out there, and he was someone his best friend in the business, Dimitroff, could vouch for.

  Dimitroff had worked with Phil Emery for a year and had been awed by him. Emery handled his demotion from college director to national scout gracefully, so much so that Dimitroff told him, “I think you deserve another chance. If anything comes up, I’ll help you get it.” When Dimitroff said it, Pioli was still working in New England. But when Pioli moved to Kansas City and began making changes in the organization, it made sense for Dimitroff: Pioli and Emery were a match.

  Pioli and Emery had met just once, briefly, about ten years earlier in Syracuse. But it was as if Emery possessed every quality that the
Chiefs needed. He spent seven years as the head strength and conditioning coach at the Naval Academy, so structure and attention to detail were a part of his repertoire. Since he had worked the previous season in Atlanta, he already had some familiarity with the system that Pioli was going to ask him to teach the scouts. But beyond the technique of scouting, Emery was able to negotiate the nearly invisible line between evaluating and being overly judgmental.

  “It’s funny; scouts are very judgmental people by nature,” Dimitroff says. “We evaluate players, we evaluate their character, we evaluate their decisions. After a while, we end up thinking that we have everything figured out, from the grocery store clerk to our wives.”

  Both Dimitroff and Pioli had enough experience with a wide variety of people to not fall into some easy scouting traps. One of Pioli’s red flags is when a scout questions a player’s intelligence. From experience, Pioli has seen intelligent young men labeled as something else simply because of the way they speak or perhaps due to a learning disability. It was a description that bothered him and if you were a scout who was going to throw it out there, you’d better have a stack of evidence to support the charge. Dimitroff laughs at a time, not so long ago, when some NFL scouts and evaluators would mark a player down on character because of multiple tattoos. He remembers presumptuous conversations about gang activity, based primarily on tattoos and where a player grew up.

  There were many reasons Emery wasn’t going to be lured into surface judgments. He had too many stories, humorous and humbling, that proved that what you see isn’t always what you get. He never thought, for example, that he would find the love of his life in a small town where Billy the Kid once roamed. Emery was a graduate assistant at Western New Mexico University, located in the mining town of Silver City, in the early 1980s. There were barely ten thousand people in town and not a whole lot of single women. That’s why it was such a surprise to Emery when he was introduced to an attractive young woman who was working as a speech-language therapist in a local school district. She was from New York City, the daughter of a Wall Street broker and a school nurse. She may have been a New Yorker, but she had a Silver City connection: She was dating the son of the biggest cattle rancher in town. Until she met Emery. They were married in Silver City just three months after they began dating.