Jay Muraco has known Pioli for nearly twenty years. Muraco, who grew up just outside of Cleveland in Brecksville, has seen the evolution of Pioli. It started when Pioli was in Muraco’s hometown as a Brown, and it continued with the Patriots and now Chiefs.
“He wasn’t always as direct as he is now,” Muraco, who scouts the Northeast for the Chiefs, says. “I’ve never been a morning guy, so I would do the same amount of work as everyone else but not get there as early. I remember years ago I came in and Scott said, ‘Hey, man. Something was said about what time you came in.’ I asked who said it and he just said, ‘Something was said.’ Now? He would just say, ‘Get your ass in here.’”
With Pioli’s rise, Muraco has consciously drawn a line between how he is with him at work and how he is when they’re just hanging out. “We’re so close,” Muraco says. “I’m mindful of joking around with him too much here and doing something that will compromise his authority. So I don’t think I bust on him nearly as much as I used to. At least not at work.”
It’s time to go back to the draft room, and it’s easy to see why Dimitroff thought Emery and Pioli would be such a good fit. Emery is a good listener and a get-to-the-point type. He wants to be sure a tackle truly has position flexibility when a scout says that he does.
“This stuff has to be real now,” Emery says. “When it gets down to brass tacks, a lot of guys, we find a lot of these tackles don’t really have the true flexibility that we kind of hope that they have. I want it to be you really believe this. Not just being hopeful.”
There’s more immediacy to these meetings than the ones they had in December. Then, the idea was to go over several names, whether they were draftable or not. Now, less than two weeks before the scouting Combine in Indianapolis, the players discussed in depth are the ones who will be on the front board when the Chiefs start drafting in April. There’s more big-picture urgency, too. Everyone is aware that the fancy footballs they were given at the beginning of the day are nice items for office shelves and family dens, but the goal is to get one of those footballs from a Super Bowl. When Emery and the scouts speak of another running back, 2009 Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram of Alabama, they’re all in agreement about who he is and where he could help them go.
“He’ll be a starting running back for many teams in the league,” one of the scouts says. “For the Chiefs, Ingram is a three-down starter who is a younger, more athletic version of Thomas Jones. He’s not as fast as Jamaal Charles but is a more complete back that can stay healthy and on the field for three downs.”
“Can he make people miss in the hole?” Emery asks.
“I don’t think he’s a shake guy,” the scout says. “He’s your classic Steady Eddie. He’s just going to do the same thing. He’s closer to Thomas than he is to Jamaal, if you want to compare the two.”
“And I know he got hurt this year toward the end of the season. Was he back to being as good as he was in ’09?”
“I thought so,” the scout replies.
“So you see him as a replacement for Thomas?”
“Yes.”
“And a complement for Charles?”
“Absolutely. I mean, if we’re going to continue to have a dual group back there like we did this year, I think he’d be the perfect replacement.”
Emery obviously knows the answers to many of these questions before he asks them, and even in February, two months before the draft, he knows the Chiefs are unlikely to spend a first-round pick on a running back. But he wants them all thinking in a certain way, and they all know what way that is with his next question.
“If I’m not saying this straight, just ask for clarity: Is he a guy that can help us win championships? Or is he a guy that is the reason for winning championships?”
“I would say he’d be one of the reasons we could win a championship,” the scout says without hesitation. “Just because I think he’s a salt guy. You know, he’s the guy that’s going to finish off the game. He’s never going to put the ball on the ground. You can just see the confidence in him especially at the end of the game to protect the football.”
The exchange is proof of how far Pioli has brought the Chiefs’ scouting staff since he took over in 2009. The group is detailed and conscientious now, from top to bottom. Still, there can only be so many debates and analyses in a day, even for football careerists, before they begin to wear down. They’ll be back tomorrow to repeat the process. As for Pioli, he’s had a productive day. He has absorbed good information from the meetings and redirected them when necessary. He’s also closed a deal for a new quarterbacks coach. Sometimes you truly become a better team one day at a time.
14
Picking and Dealing
Two weeks before the draft, Bill Belichick sits at his desk in his Foxboro office and goes over possibilities and strategies. He’s relaxed, and just in case you can’t see that, you can hear it. He’s dialed into the Margaritaville station on satellite radio, with the familiar bass line of “Get Up, Stand Up” resonating off the walls.
If there’s a day when he considers walking away from pro football and throwing himself into another passion, that day won’t come in April. He loves the draft too much, layer by layer and pick by pick. He’s reached an anniversary of sorts this year: It was exactly twenty years ago when he arrived in Cleveland with a grading and scouting idea that has now grown into a grading and scouting system, with general managers in the Midwest and Southeast running some version of it. He refuses to take all the credit, saying that it was Mike Lombardi in Cleveland who helped till the land and it was Scott Pioli in New England who helped cultivate it into what it is today.
What he’s got now, in the NFL, is something collegiate-sounding. He’s got a program. It’s part of the reason that two weeks from now, the Patriots will pick seventeenth and twenty-eighth in the first round, and then pivot for pick 33, the first choice in the second round. Belichick is the rare coach who is operating with the long view, so he’s not always in a hurry to see the player right now; he’ll wait a year or even two years, which is the story with the seventeenth pick, acquired in 2009. Pick 33, which originally belonged to Carolina, was his reward for patience. The Patriots had picks 89 and 90 a year ago; the Panthers wanted 89, and they were willing to pay with their 2011 second-rounder. The result sounds like some Internet scam: Give us the eighty-ninth choice right now and you, my friend, could have a selection as high as 33 one year from now. And all you have to do is … wait for it.
It’s almost one year to the day of that deal, one of many that have shaped how Belichick goes about his draft business. He may have a grading system when it comes to the draft, but he swears that there is no draft formula, unless you consider “do your homework” to be a formula.
“You’ve obviously got your own feelings about players, but you’ve really got to know what the league thinks, too,” he says. “Whether it’s by numbers, like which positions have depth, or by players, like identifying who the risers are and what players are in free-fall. All of that information affects your decisions. Especially if you know a team or teams are after a certain player. It doesn’t even matter which team it is. You just know there’s a certain guy teams are trying to climb to get. Well, if you’re in position for that player and you don’t really want him, then, you know, you have a market.”
On the flip side, sometimes you want a player and you perceive the rest of the league wants him, too. It can lead to a case of overdrafting, or picking a player too high, which Belichick admits the Patriots did in 2009.
“Sebastian Vollmer is a good example,” he says of the Patriots’ starting right tackle, one of the team’s four second-rounders in ’09. “There’s no way he was really a second-round pick. Based on film or really based on the player he was at the end of the ’08 season. You know, East-West game and all that. You took him betting on improvement and upside. We knew that there was an undertow of Vollmer. And it was just the question of, ‘When’s this guy going to go?’
“He should have been a fourth-or fifth-round pick, by the film, by his performance. But you saw him as an ascending player and he had rare size, and there were a lot of things that you had to fix and all that. But it was clear the league liked him. Now, the question is always, ‘How much do they like him and where are they willing to buy?’ I’m sure for some teams it was the fourth round. For some teams it was the third round. But we just said, ‘Look, we really want this guy. This is too high to pick him, but if we wait we might not get him, so we’re just going to step up and take him.’
“And sometimes when you do that you’re right and sometimes when you do that you’re wrong and everybody looks at you like, ‘Damn, you could have had him in the fourth.’”
The upcoming draft will be Belichick’s seventeenth as a head coach, his twelfth with the Patriots. Over the years, his teams have had a sampling of enough first-round positions to qualify them for a draft lotto: 2, 6, 9, 9, 10, 13, 14, 21, 24, and, of course, 32. His penchant for draft-day deals has put his teams in draft slots that belie their success. After their last Super Bowl appearance, in February 2008, they held the seventh overall pick and after a trade down picked tenth. They had the best record in football last season, 14–2, yet they have multiple picks woven into the early rounds of the 2011 draft, which will allow them to be the team most capable of steering it in their favor.
Belichick remembers all the drafts, through and through, without notes or media guides. He remembers the time, in 2003, when he started to panic. The Patriots held pick 14, the Bears were on the clock, and just one of New England’s desired defensive linemen was on the board. Belichick had a feeling that the Bears would take a defensive lineman, too, and he didn’t think it would be his guy, Ty Warren. But he wasn’t sure.
He called Bears GM Jerry Angelo, an old friend, and asked if he wanted to move the pick. He was offering a sixth-rounder to move up one spot. Angelo asked what he was coming up to get.
“A defensive lineman,” he said.
“Well, we’re taking a defensive lineman, too.”
“I know you are,” Belichick said. “But if we’re not coming to get your guy, it’s basically a free sixth.”
They danced for a few seconds, trying to see who would actually mention a name first. Finally, Belichick said, “We want Ty Warren.” And Angelo said, “We want Michael Haynes.” They made the deal anyway.
Belichick has seen enough drafts unfold that he has been able to pick up a general pattern of what each round represents.
“The first-rounders are the guys, obviously, with the fewest questions. In the second round, a lot of times you find players with first-round talent but not first-round performance or production, if you will,” he says. “Then in the third round, you see guys who are maybe better football players than a lot of guys in the second round, but not as maybe overall talented, in terms of measurements. So I think there’s a certain bust factor, if you will, in the second round. That’s just in general.”
He’s been around long enough to have specific examples from his own teams.
“In last year’s draft, Brandon Spikes was a good football player who didn’t run well and didn’t test particularly well, but he’s probably a better football player than a lot of guys that were taken in the second round ahead of him who tested well, who had more upside but produced less on the field than he did,” Belichick says, referring to his young inside linebacker. “I’d say that’s fairly common. In the second round, you’re more likely to say, ‘Let’s get somebody fast. Let’s get a Bethel Johnson or a Mike Wallace.’ Okay, well, one of those guys works out and one of them doesn’t. Neither one of them was any big deal in college.
“You want that speed. Or if you want that kind of upside, you want that kind of potential, then that’s where you’ve got to take it, because it’s not going to be there in the third round, generally speaking. Those players, if you don’t take them somebody else is going to take them. I’m not saying a guy who just goes out and works out. I’m saying a guy who’s got a lot of stuff going for him as a player but not enough to really buy early.
“You know, Ben Watson. Thirty-second pick. He’s practically a second-round pick. Now, if he had played to his ability in college he would have gone in the middle of the first round. But he didn’t, so you hope you can generate that out of him. Then you have an All-Pro tight end. But in the end, he played in the pros about like he played in college.”
Watson was drafted in 2004 because of his size and speed. He played six seasons with the Patriots, with his best production coming in a forty-nine-catch third season. His signature play featured a different kind of catch, though. He ran from the goal line, crossed the field, and then ran the entire length of the field to catch cornerback Champ Bailey and prevent him from scoring on a hundred-yard-plus interception return. The Patriots lost that playoff game in Denver, but people still talk about that play. Watson left New England after the 2009 season and currently plays for the Browns.
Even now, still a week away from the final positioning of the Patriots’ board and fifteen days from the start of the draft itself, Belichick senses emerging plans and information that will help him in the draft room. He thinks he’s got a handle on who this year’s tumbler is: Clemson defensive end Da’Quan Bowers, who has scared off a lot of teams with his microfracture knee surgery. He notices that many teams have visited with quarterbacks and seem prepared to draft them early, a move that will help the Patriots because it will help push down more good players that they want. He also envisions a pack of players, likely selected in the 15 to 40 range, who have similar value.
“I think some teams are going to look up at that board in the first round, see where they’ve ranked their players, and say, ‘Okay, well, here’s our guy. He’s still there. Let’s go get him.’ Whereas to me the reality of it is that guy’s packed in with a bunch of other guys and it’s just a question of how the league ranks them,” he says. “This year it’s all jumbled, so when you say, ‘That’s our number one guy … three guys have gone ahead of him, he’s still there.’ Well, that’s because he’s probably still there on ten other boards, too.
“It’s the dynamics of each year as the whole thing gets put together and there’s no real—I don’t think there’s any real formula to it. You’ve just got to do your homework and then as things happen during the draft be able to put it together.”
Anyone who has ever worked with Belichick understands how much of an emphasis he places on being prepared. They also have been told, time and again, that what he wants to know about players is how they will help the Patriots. That’s all that matters. So if Vollmer is drafted in the second round and the talking heads on TV say it’s a reach, it’s irrelevant. His mission is always to help the Patriots, and sometimes the swings have connected and sometimes they’ve become Bethel Johnson and Chad Jackson.
What you do is gather all the information that you can, listen to a number of opinions, and then do what you believe is right. One thousand miles away, in Atlanta, that’s what one of the men who used to work for him has been doing for the last month.
Only a few people know what Thomas Dimitroff has been thinking about in the last three and a half weeks. He wants to move out of the Falcons’ first-round pick, number 27, and get the team in position to draft either Julio Jones of Alabama or A. J. Green, the kid from just down the road at Georgia. Both players are wide receivers and top-ten talents, so the jump from 27 to, say, 4 or 6 will be a pricey one.
Talent is not an issue.
When asked to compare Jones and Green, Lionel Vital quickly gets to the point.
“Green is Randy Moss,” he says. “Jones is Terrell Owens.”
When Les Snead is asked, his answer differs slightly.
“When you turn on the film, Green reminds you of a better-route-running, just-as-fast Randy Moss,” he says. “He plays fast and has that great body control. With Julio, I think you’re looking at a better Michael Irvin. He’s just a strong human being. Both
of those guys are going early. They’re both starting receivers in this league.”
Dimitroff doesn’t need convincing. He’s already made several exploratory phone calls. He initially thought of playing a bit of draft leapfrog, where he would call a team like Washington, which holds pick 16. He would then take 16 and make another move to the top ten. But it’s the equivalent of buying two one-way tickets when a round-trip flight is the cheaper and more efficient way to go. So he’s made calls to teams residing at the top of the draft, calling Denver at 2, and he’s worked his way down to San Francisco at 7.
Two friends of his in the business, Tom Heckert and Trent Baalke, are representatives of picks 6 and 7. Heckert and the Browns have pick 6 and Baalke and the 49ers are right after them at 7. Dimitroff is trying to discern what it will take to move up twenty or twenty-one spots, and the answer to the question won’t come for a while. Throughout the process, he’s up-front with Heckert, who wants to know if he’s talked with Baalke, and he’s honest with Baalke, who wants to know if he’s talked with Heckert.
“It’s important to have candid conversations with people you can trust,” Dimitroff says. “It saves a lot of time because you’re able to talk compensation without going through the feeling-out process.”
But there is a process, and it’s in-house. Arthur Blank supports Dimitroff’s idea, but in the spirit of collaborative business, Blank wants him to talk it over with people outside of personnel. It’s yet another example of how different Atlanta is from New England. Belichick would be taken aback if team owner Robert Kraft asked him to share his trading plans with multiple people in the organization. It might even be a deal breaker. Belichick knows what he wants, and he has many assistants, from linebackers coach Matt Patricia to veteran offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia, whom he can go to for advice. With that said, sometimes he tells them what he’s up to and sometimes he doesn’t. Blank’s suggestion to Dimitroff doesn’t come from lack of confidence or disrespect; it comes from the Home Depot. In the business that made him billions, Blank had gotten used to an organizational structure in which everyone, including himself and Bernie Marcus, was available to be challenged if an idea seemed to be too bold or even reckless. It didn’t mean that those working under them had veto power, but there was always the possibility that a raised point would at least act as a speed bump.
War Room Page 33
