War Room

by Michael Holley

  The Falcons passed on so many black-dotters in the 2010 draft that team owner Arthur Blank called for further investigation. Blank wanted to be sure the Falcons weren’t being too extreme with their grading standards. Dimitroff did some research and reported that a handful of teams, the Chargers, Chiefs, and Colts among them, had not selected a single player from the Falcons’ skull-and-crossbones list, either. He told Blank that he had no issues being in such a small group since he had immense respect for each of those teams’ GMs.

  Besides, a lot of what teams saw as high-risk or not, or even urgently athletic or not, was subjective. When Dimitroff was with the Patriots, he could watch the same film as Scott Pioli and Bill Belichick and sometimes the three of them would walk away seeing different things. He had learned a lot of football and management from them both, but becoming them was never the point; he was an extension of a Belichick Tree, not a Belichick Monolith. So he hadn’t been surprised in April when his high risk became Belichick’s late second-round value and the Patriots selected Florida linebacker Brandon Spikes. It was the same story in the fourth round, when one man’s “character concern” was another’s “this is by far the best player on the board,” and that’s how the Patriots wound up with another Florida player, talented tight end Aaron Hernandez.

  It was important for him to have a vision for where he was trying to take the football-operations arm of the franchise and to make sure he wasn’t straying too far from his core while doing it. Before the season began, he typed a few notes in his iPad about general-managing in his third year. Be true to yourself, he wrote. Remember your roots: tough, honest, organic. Keep it real.

  After their first game of the season, an overtime loss in Pittsburgh, the Falcons had impressed by winning their next two. They crushed the Cardinals 41–7, and went on the road to division rival New Orleans the next week and beat the Saints in overtime, 27–24. Dimitroff was thrilled that the team was making his job harder with each successful week they had: The more they won, the lower their first-round pick would be in the spring, which would make it more complex to leap from the back of the room to the front.

  Dimitroff didn’t mind. He loved to win, and he wasn’t afraid of doing something unconventional to make it happen.

  At twelve fifteen Sunday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before game time, Lionel Vital stood on the Georgia Dome field watching players from the 49ers and Falcons go through warm-up drills. Vital, or “L” as Dimitroff sometimes calls him, didn’t miss much, even when someone came over to say hello. His brown eyes instinctively scanned the field, left to right, always noticing something that he could use later.

  It was easy to see why Vital, the Falcons’ assistant director of player personnel, initially thought of a career in law enforcement after his NFL playing days were over in the late 1980s. Bald, about five feet nine inches, muscular, and someone who smiles as long as you do it first, Vital had the look of a man who could knock heads and not overtalk while doing it. He was forty-eight and had four daughters and three grandkids, but he was not someone you’d bet against in the weight room. He had to have a title, but it did a poor job of describing who he was to the Falcons’ general manager. Vital grew up in Louisiana and officially had six brothers and sisters, but he considered Dimitroff a seventh sibling. They’d known each other for more than twenty years. Vital worked for Belichick in Cleveland and with Dimitroff’s father on the Browns’ scouting staff in the early 1990s. He twice scouted for the Ravens, as well as the Jets and Patriots. He knows Dimitroff so well that he swore that if you gave him just a brief description of where Dimitroff was, he can tell you what he’s thinking.

  “The thing about Thomas is, he could be standing on the other side of the field, and I know what he thinks about certain things,” he says. “I know how he ticks. And he knows me, too. He could be in a room with fifty guys, and I don’t have to be in that room, okay? If I know what they’re talking about, the topic, I can tell you how he came across to them.”

  As soon as Dimitroff was hired in Atlanta, Vital didn’t have to wait for the phone call. He knew where his next stop was and that he had to be ready. He was working with the Ravens at the time, recognized as one of the best scouts in the country, but Baltimore GM Ozzie Newsome understood that Vital had to go and work with a friend whom he once roomed with when they were both kids in their twenties. They were in the World League then, doing an unofficial audition for an updated Odd Couple. They wrestled over what was on the TV and how loud it was, jostled for position on the basketball court, and practically memorized each other’s dinner orders: There would be shrimp and rice and vegetables and a huge dessert for one of them, while the other one would go for a salad, no meat, some rice, and maybe a bite of the dessert. In between their brotherly squabbles, they’d talk about moments like the one they were in now, when they’d be on the biggest stage, working together without fear of backstabbing or petty power struggles.

  One of the things they never argued about now was Vital’s scouting and evaluation style. Part of his strength was what he was doing before Falcons-49ers. He was watching players in action. He was looking at the San Francisco defensive backs to see how they turn their hips, even in drills. He was paying attention to cornerback Nate Clements and it was clear that he’d have something to say about him before the game began. Dimitroff knew that Vital was not going to be the one who turned in a thesis to describe a player.

  “I’m not going to sit here and write a book, okay?” he says. “That’s not my forte and it’s not what’s important, to be honest with you. Because Bill always said, the final three or four lines is what he really wanted. I know guys that can write novels and be wrong. It sounds like Shakespeare and it’s dead wrong. My thing is, can you play or not? Is he going to start or not? If you can pinpoint it like that, I think it makes you exceptional.

  “I always got the free pass on the novels. They wanted my opinion more than anything else. And that’s how Thomas uses me here. He knows I’m going to see the player the way I need to see him. It’s going to be unorthodox, but in the end it’s probably going to be pretty … the people I’ve worked with will tell you, it’s probably going to be pretty accurate.”

  People he works with now and people he’s worked with in the past approached him when they noticed him on the sideline. Mike Johnson, a former Falcons assistant who worked with Vital in Baltimore, stopped by to give him a hug and say hello. There was also a visit from Falcons tight ends coach Chris Scelfo, a fellow Louisiana native who informed Vital that life should be good for the Falcons later in the afternoon.

  “Tony Gonzalez is in the building today,” Scelfo joked, “so I think I’ve done my part as a coach. I got him to the game.”

  They both laughed.

  As players ran by, undrafted free agents and first-rounders and fifth-round finds among them, Vital broke down the art of scouting. He said he learned to focus on a player’s strengths from former Browns scout Ernie Plank. Dick Haley taught him how to have confidence without overthinking the process. Haley would study a few tapes on a player, watch him practice, and see a few highlights. He would leave it at that, because he didn’t want his scouts talking themselves into or out of a player by watching tape after tape. Belichick taught him to eliminate excess, hone in on what a player could be for the system, and then definitively say what he could or could not do.

  “When I was a young scout, my first five years, I was guessing some, because you have no history to gauge,” he says. “When you get in this for ten years or twelve years, now you have twelve drafts to compare it to. But in your first couple of years, you really don’t know. You’ve got to be confident, and you’ve got to act like you know and all that, but you’re guessing your ass off.”

  He was asked when he crossed the threshold from guessing to knowing.

  “When I stopped talking to other scouts about players,” he says. “A lot of times scouts will bounce it off other scouts when they see them out there. ‘Hey, man, you saw t
his guy, what do you think?’ They’re cross-checking themselves. I don’t even talk to other scouts about players, unless it’s double-checking background information. I don’t have phone conversations with scouts about players. I give all my extra time on the phone to my girls, my kids. I wouldn’t want another scout to screw me up.”

  He looked again at the defensive backs. It was twelve thirty. More people, dressed in red and black, were filling the dome. A couple more people from personnel, Les Snead and Ran Carthon, stopped by to acknowledge him. Vital didn’t lose his train of thought. He could talk players, specifically defensive backs, all day.

  “I know how I feel about the guy,” he says. “I have my own feelings on these players when I see them, and I’m confident in that because it’s been right and it’s been good to me. Trust me: If it had not been good to me, you would know and everybody else would know, too. I’d be sitting out somewhere else. So at this point in my career, I’m not worried about missing on the player. I’m going to hit most of them. I hate to say it like that, but it is what it is.”

  He remembers all the misses. He had two guys in his home state, Charles Tillman and Ike Taylor, whom he missed in the same year. And they played at the same school. He missed on Tillman because he thought he was too stiff. He missed on Taylor because, well, he didn’t think he was too smart. He was big and fast, a former running back with limited experience at corner, but he couldn’t imagine going back to his team at the time, the Patriots, and trying to sell Taylor to them. In that same draft, 2003, New England took a corner who ran much slower than Taylor, Asante Samuel.

  “A lot of guys may miss on a defensive back because he’s athletic. Being a good defensive back is not just about being athletic. The first thing I want to see is if the guy’s natural and instinctive,” he says. “If I was in the backyard picking the team, I’d want that backyard guy. Brent Grimes is that kind of guy we have here who can just play the game. You know, he’s quick twitch, he’s instinctive, he sees the field, he’s natural at it. He doesn’t really have to prepare for it. He gets out of bed, he can play.

  “The guy who has to think about it, he’s mechanical. You’ve got to overcoach him to do it, and I’m afraid of him. Because you can’t coach him on that final drive. The natural instincts kick in. I’m looking for natural instincts. And of course you want mental toughness. Mental toughness is the focus. Not losing his confidence. Not getting dumb when things are not good. Having an energy about him and no one can take that away from him. Getting beat and turning around and saying, ‘I couldn’t care less I just got beat, come back again, my man.’ He gets beat, so what? And even if they lose the game, he’s going to say, ‘I’m sorry it happened, man. It just happens. But I’ll be back next week.’”

  He stood with his arms folded as he wrapped up the conversation. He stared extra-long at number 22, the 49ers’ Clements. He’d been watching him off and on for a half hour and he finally was able to say what he was thinking. The 49ers gave Clements an eight-year, $80 million contract to play in San Francisco. Clements, a big corner at just over six feet and 210 pounds, played his first six years in Buffalo.

  “He’s not a great corner,” Vital says. “Teams aren’t dumb. You just don’t let great corners walk out the door. Buffalo knew he wasn’t great.” He watched Clements turn and chase a receiver in a drill. “See? He’s not a quick-twitch guy. He’s tall, so it’s hard for him to change directions. If you put a double move on him, he can be exposed.”

  Whether Clements factored into the game or not, everyone affiliated with the Falcons understood what was at stake. Simply, people were at that point where they expected the Falcons to beat the 49ers, who were 0–3.

  As one o’clock approached, Blank and Dimitroff sat side by side in a small room inside the owner’s private suite. If they had opened the door, they would have seen a range of personalities, from Bernie Marcus, one of Blank’s Home Depot cofounders, to the owner’s wife, Stephanie, and the couple’s nine-year-old fraternal twins. But the door remained closed for much of the first half, and that was a good thing.

  “Daddy’s not going to be a happy camper tonight,” one of the twins says to Stephanie. The 49ers had taken a quick 14–0 lead.

  “It’s a long game, sweetheart,” Stephanie replies.

  Inside the small room, which is next to the replay officials’ booth, Blank and Dimitroff gestured and pounded tables. After the GM’s top free-agent acquisition, Dunta Robinson, was called for what appeared to be a bogus thirty-four-yard pass-interference penalty, Dimitroff yelled, “What the hell was that?” and threw his hands in the air. A few times he looked at the men in the booth and shrugged as if to say, “What are you trying to do to us?” He could be critical of his own team during games as well. He and Smith make a point of having a postgame conversation about any frustrations either of them have so issues won’t become overblown later in the week or season.

  In the third quarter, Blank decided that he should spend at least a couple minutes with visitors in the box. He had taken off the jacket of his expensive pinstriped suit, yet he still looked dignified in his startling white shirt with French cuffs. He is known as one of the city’s most stylish residents, and although their tastes are different, Blank’s love of fashion has rubbed off on his GM. Sometimes it even goes too far. Once, Blank invited Dimitroff to a weekend Hawks game. Dimitroff asked him what he should wear and the owner replied, “Well, it is a Saturday night. You probably should wear a sports coat.” When he got to the game, surrounded by jeans and casual-shirt wearers, Dimitroff saw a puzzled Stephanie. “Why are you so dressed up?” she asked. All he could do was smile. He’d never thought so much about clothes in his life.

  Blank sat next to Marcus for a moment and then stood for a big third-down play for the Falcons’ defense. They didn’t make the stop.

  “No! No!” the sixty-nine-year-old owner yelled, jumping up and down in front of his ninety-six-year-old mother, Molly. It was a humorous scene and a bit unusual, but Molly gave a slight smile and continued to focus on the game. Blank left the general box and returned to the small room with Dimitroff.

  The Falcons were able to score on San Francisco, but not enough to take the lead, so they trailed 14–13 with two minutes to play. Darryl Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution once joked that Smith likely doesn’t know who Beyoncé or Kobe Bryant is, but you can’t sneak much football information by him. The team had heard all of Smith’s numbers about close games in the NFL, how 25 percent of games in the league are decided by 3 points or fewer and nearly half are decided by 8 or fewer points. His mission, he liked to explain, was to be the least-penalized team in the league and take care of the football, because the percentages told you that the game would likely be decided by a fourth-quarter drive.

  Based on those stats, the Falcons were exactly where they wanted to be against the 49ers. Dimitroff’s first draft pick, quarterback Matt Ryan, was leading the team down the field for a possible winning field goal. But he made a mistake. The man Vital identified before the game, Clements, leapt out of nowhere in zone coverage and intercepted Ryan’s attempt. The stadium groaned. Clements certainly looked great on the play, not at all inhibited by quick-twitch deficiencies.

  But the problem was that he kept running. If he’d simply slid to the turf and gave himself up, the 49ers would have had the ability to run out the clock and win the game. Clements seemed unaware of the game situation and ran for the end zone. He didn’t notice Falcons receiver Roddy White running behind him, and he didn’t secure the football, so after racing for thirty-nine yards Clements allowed White to poke the ball out of his hands and to the turf. It was the kind of play, defined by urgent athleticism, Dimitroff had been preaching about since he became GM. While he was college scouting director in New England, Dimitroff saw the Patriots win a play-off game in San Diego when Troy Brown made a play similar to White’s and saved the season.

  A play-off game in January is more dramatic than game four in October,
but the excitement could be felt in the crowd of more than sixty-six thousand fans. Atlanta recovered the ball, at its own seven, and after some smart passes from Ryan to White and a key third-down conversion from Ryan to Gonzalez, kicker Matt Bryant was in position for the winning field goal. He attempted a forty-three-yarder, and at first it looked like something that Phil Niekro used to throw all those years for the Braves. But then it corrected itself and tumbled through the uprights.

  Atlanta 16, San Francisco 14.

  “I hate sloppy football,” Dimitroff says three hours after the game. “It irritates me. I know it’s a win, but I struggle with inconsistency. Our job is to limit inconsistency with our coaches, our scouts, and our players.”

  Inconsistency may have been a problem during the game, but Dimitroff was confident it wasn’t going to last the entire season. The Falcons, at 3–1, were good and he knew it. Yes, they were going to have to fight off occasional inconsistency. But they weren’t going to have to remake their offense. They weren’t going to have to trade away their number one receiver because he was being a distraction. In a couple days, the whole league would know: That was a story the Patriots would have to deal with.

  10

  Shelf Life

  As soon as the Patriots acquired Randy Moss for a fourth-round pick on the weekend of the 2007 draft, they knew they were on a different kind of clock. It was one naturally set to an alarm, and they weren’t sure when it was going to go off. It truly was just a matter of time.

  They’d had previous dealings with players perceived to be controversial, so they weren’t scared off by the receiver or the comments he’d made as a member of the Oakland Raiders. While there in 2006, he’d admitted to reporters that he was dropping more balls than usual. They were shocked to hear his explanation: “Maybe because I’m unhappy, and I’m not too much excited about what’s going on, so my concentration and focus level tends to go down when I’m in a bad mood. So all I can say is, if you put me in a good situation and make me happy, man, you get good results.”