War Room

by Michael Holley

  In the fourth quarter, history is irrelevant. Sanchez, who threw eight interceptions in his previous two games in Foxboro, finds Jerricho Cotchery for a fifty-eight-yard completion to the New England thirteen. A few plays later, he connects with Santonio Holmes for a seven-yard touchdown pass that puts the Jets up 21–11.

  It’s beginning to become real to the sixty-eight thousand fans at the game and millions more watching across six states. A loss to the Jets? In the play-offs? Awful. No matter what happens going forward, whether the Jets win the Super Bowl or even make it there, Patriots fans are going to have to hear about this game, narrated in Jersey, Queens, and Long Island accents. That’s how it is when you’re within two hundred miles of your rivals who share your DNA but not your allegiances. You know how they think and vice versa, and the only consolation for your own letdowns is the knowledge that they’re miserable, too. It’s bad enough when they have joy, but when their joy is linked to your heartbreak, it’s humiliating.

  And that’s the way it was on the field and in the stands after the Jets were able to walk away with a 28–21 victory. Branch called the New Yorkers classless and Scott said the New Englanders’ defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed. The words didn’t change anything. For the second year in a row, Belichick had to confront another play-off “first” in New England. The previous January, there was the loss to the Ravens, the first home play-off loss in Belichick’s ten Patriots seasons. In January 2011, it wasn’t just a loss at home, it was a loss as a number one seed in the divisional round, which had never happened to a team that had Belichick as the head or assistant coach.

  Belichick was used to 14–2 teams high-fiving and patting each other on the back after these games in January. These games were the reason he and Scott Pioli had talked about being weeks behind in the scouting process, because they couldn’t attend all-star games like the Senior Bowl in Mobile. They couldn’t, past-tense. They were busy preparing for conference championships and Super Bowls. But in January 2011, Pioli, Belichick, and Dimitroff would all be in Mobile, gazing at the play-off lives of other teams, the same way other teams used to gaze at them.

  The three of them have vastly different personalities, yet they were all experiencing the same feeling. It was a gnawing that wouldn’t go away, equal parts anger and shame. Not once when they all worked together, not a single time, had they gone to the play-offs and come away with nothing. Hell, even the Cleveland Browns, where Belichick missed the play-offs in four of his five seasons there, were able to win in January the one time they made it to the postseason.

  There are no champions of the regular season. It’s the reason people praised Bill Parcells, Mike Holmgren, Jon Gruden, and Chuck Noll, although Marty Schottenheimer has a higher career winning percentage than all of them. Schottenheimer doesn’t have the rings, though, while the quartet he towers over in the regular season has a combined eight.

  It’s what Pioli was hinting at when he had his interview in Dallas. How do you call yourself dominant at anything when you don’t win a play-off game in eighteen years and win just three in the last twenty-one? He was a part of that dubious Chiefs streak now, and his challenge was to build a team that could break it. It’s why Dimitroff had been so annoyed in 2009 when his team missed the play-offs. The only thing worse than missing them is losing in them. For all the praise that the counterculture GM had gotten from the mainstream, and he was on the verge of winning his second executive-of-the-year award in three years, his point was never to come to Atlanta and be known as a renaissance man who loves football. The mission was to create a contender, not a team that still had a link to Michael Vick: Despite Dimitroff’s awards and his drafting of a new quarterback, the last time the Falcons won a play-off game, 2004, was the height of the Vick era.

  It’s why Belichick undersold everything in the regular season. It’s why he didn’t have or crave the entertainment gene that his Jets counterpart, Ryan, possessed. Twelve wins, thirteen, or sixteen—no one cared if you didn’t close the deal. Belichick and the Patriots found that out in 2007, coming so close to doing what was supposed to be impossible in a league so anchored in parity and balance. But since that night in the desert, when the Patriots were a couple minutes away from perfection, they’d missed the playoffs one year and been bounced from them in the first and divisional round the other two.

  These three decision-makers all had something to prove. There wasn’t even a debate about that. They felt the pressure to prove it, and so did everyone around them.

  12

  The Mobile Dinner

  All it takes is a simple phone call. That’s been made clear to Thomas Dimitroff since his first day on the job in Atlanta. If he ever needs to use Arthur Blank’s private G4 jet for business purposes, it’s his, as long as it’s available. So if he wants to see three different workouts in three different parts of the country and be home in time to put his son to bed, all he has to do is ask.

  Dimitroff and his staff have taken Blank up on the offer many times, and they’ve walked away in awe of the power, luxury, and convenience after each ride. But in late January, with the entire league making its annual trip to Alabama for a week of scouting, socializing, and gossip, the Falcons decided to go SUV for the five-hour drive from Atlanta to Mobile. In the next few months, leading up to the April draft, there would be many good reasons to use the plane. Everyone knew that the general manager was determined to add explosive, urgent athletes to the roster, and sometimes finding those players meant hopping a jet in the middle of the week. For now, the search would begin with five guys on four wheels.

  This trip to Alabama was already guaranteed to be more successful than the last time they all piled into a truck. This time, at least everyone was paying attention to the gas tank. The previous year, they had made the two-hour drive to Auburn to scout the university’s pro day. On the way back to Georgia, they may have been wrapped up in a conversation about players, or maybe it was the good music that was pounding the speakers. Whatever the distraction was, no one noticed that the needle had gone well below E until the truck began to sputter and they had to pull to the side of the road.

  What a sight: Dimitroff, Lionel Vital, Dave Caldwell, and Les Snead, the Falcons’ top evaluators, stranded because they didn’t evaluate the gas gauge. They were lucky, though. They were just thirty miles from home, in Newnan, Georgia, and the guy who stopped to help them was good friends with the owner of a local gas station. News traveled fast to the office, and Snead was given the bulk of the blame since he was the driver and an Auburn grad as well. The next day, he was teased by head coach Mike Smith and also found gas cards on his desk.

  The trip to Mobile, with the same quartet plus director of football administration Nick Polk, had more focus, and not just with the fuel. The loss to the Packers was just two weeks earlier, and no one was over it.

  “It’s like that breakup you have with that girl or that guy. You wake up the next day and you still can’t believe it’s over,” Snead says. “And as bad as I felt about it, being a longtime Atlanta person, I felt even worse for the fans. That was the best and loudest Falcons crowd I’ve ever been a part of.”

  It didn’t make any of them feel better that Green Bay was not a typical sixth seed and that the Pack had gone on the road to knock off the Bears in the conference championship game. They all had opinions about what had gone wrong that night at the dome and what needed to be done to fix it.

  “You need guys with edge,” says Vital. “This is a mean game. You’ve got to have that edge, that attitude. I think it starts on defense first, because if you show me a ferocious defense, most of the time it’s gonna be a team that does some damage in the play-offs.”

  During the season, even after victories, Dimitroff had been unhappy with aspects of the team’s play. He believed the Falcons needed to take better advantage of the resources they had on offense. He was bothered by their middle-of-the-pack scoring numbers, especially since they had Matt Ryan, Tony Gonzalez, Roddy White, and Michael
Turner. It almost seemed impossible that the Falcons could rank thirty-first out of thirty-two teams in explosive plays, which are plays of twenty yards or more.

  Shortly after the Packers loss, Dimitroff, Blank, and Smith had met for dinner in Atlanta to discuss the season and how the Falcons could get better. Over the course of a conversation that at times became tense and animated, especially when the GM praised the talent on offense but went to the edge of questioning how it was designed, Dimitroff found himself citing Bruce Lee and Sun Tzu. “Bruce Lee was good at a lot of things, but when he wanted to knock you out he played to his strengths,” he says of the martial arts icon. “He had two or three knockout moves and he used them.” As for Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, Dimitroff referred to his unpredictability. “Your enemy thinks you’re coming from one direction prepared to fight in a certain way and you do something totally different,” he says. “It’s the idea of using some element of deception to always keep an opponent on his heels.”

  It wasn’t necessary to read philosophy or study martial arts to see where Dimitroff was going. He expected more, right now. Since October, long before the play-off loss, he had been thinking of pulling off something dramatic with his draft picks. For what he wanted to do, recent history wasn’t on his side. Teams that traded multiple first-rounders to get into the top of the draft usually weren’t smiling three or four years after the trades. Washington once traded the sixth and twenty-eighth overall picks for the right to move up to number four and select Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard. Three years later, they let him go in the expansion draft. The Saints once traded eight draft picks for another Heisman winner, Ricky Williams, and after all the stunts were over—head coach Mike Ditka wearing a dreadlocked wig; Williams appearing on the cover of a magazine in a wedding dress, signifying the commitment the Saints made to him; Williams conducting interviews wearing a helmet and visor—the Saints traded him to Miami. And although Kentucky’s Dewayne Robertson didn’t win the Heisman, the Jets moved up for him as if he had in 2003. They traded overall picks 13 and 20 for the right to pick Robertson fourth. Their general manager at the time, Terry Bradway, said he didn’t see any players projected in the 13-to-20 range who excited him. Robertson turned out to be a bust, and several players drafted after 13, including Troy Polamalu, Dallas Clark, and Nnamdi Asomugha, turned out to be impact players.

  Taking a trip to Mobile for the Senior Bowl wasn’t going to solve all the concerns Dimitroff had about the Falcons, but it wasn’t a stretch to say the week there could be significant. As disappointed as he was not to be preparing for the Super Bowl as the Packers and Steelers were, Dimitroff didn’t believe the Falcons were two or three drafts from greatness. He and Bill Belichick both saw draft picks as capital, but there was a difference of opinion on how to spend it. Belichick liked to roll some of his picks into the future and watch them mature after a year in the bank. Dimitroff was okay with that, too, although he believed some years were for accumulating and some were for cashing out.

  As the Falcons made their way to Interstate 65 toward the Gulf Coast and Mobile, everyone in the truck had a rough idea of how the five hours would unfold. The first hour or two would be used for Dimitroff to make and return phone calls. There would be a fast food stop along the way with everyone, including the pescatarian GM, walking away satisfied. The reason for that was Snead, who grew up in Eufaula, Alabama, and claimed to know where every Whole Foods and natural-foods-friendly place was in the state. He once found a “late-night hippie pizza joint with tofu subs” in the middle of Alabama as he and Dimitroff were finishing up a scouting trip. After the food stop, they would listen to music for a while, laugh, and bond. Then there would be an impromptu fifteen-minute staff meeting. Dimitroff would look at film on his iPad, and then, in the final hour, they’d all look at one another and agree: We should have flown.

  Football people love the Senior Bowl and especially the week that leads up to it. They love the practices, where they get to measure just how fast and strong a player is compared to the top athletes in the country. They love to see how a player reacts when he’s beaten in a drill or dominates it; how he responds to instruction from the pro coaches on-site; how he interacts with teammates who make him look either good or bad. It’s a great way of getting information that has either innocently slipped through the scouting cracks or has been hidden by certain schools who don’t want scouts to know everything about their players’ limitations.

  It’s easy to latch on to a favorite player here, especially for veteran scouts. You see a player do something and it reminds you of what you saw a great one do fifteen years earlier. Dick Haley used to watch these practices and when a player jumped, Haley would shift his eyes from the height of the leap and focus instead on the landing, because that told a more revealing athleticism story in his opinion. He’d always remind his son, Todd, “No matter how fast and strong they are, they still have to be able to play football. Don’t lose sight of that.” Mobile is the place where you find dozens of scouts trying to become the next Dick Haley, identifying some of the same undervalued gems that he did in the 1970s.

  Actually, that’s the average scout’s reward: being excited about a player, having your boss heavily consider your opinion, and then seeing “your guy” picked by your team on draft day. It’s got to be a labor of love for most college scouts. Some of them spend two hundred days or more on the road, and when they go home, the paychecks they bring with them are relatively modest compared to the men they report to. The average area scout makes between $40,000 and $50,000 annually, and national scouts bring in $80,000 to $90,000. The average GM makes $1.2 million.

  In the first few nights here, some of the scouts who hop in and out of the popular bars on Dauphin Street are desperately trying to climb to the next professional notch. But for many of them, it’s more about football and team-building than money. Besides, some of the more keen football watchers believe that promotions and pay raises will naturally come as they excel at their jobs.

  One of the scouts here is Jim Nagy, who works for the Chiefs now after spending seven seasons with Scott Pioli in New England. Nagy, thirty-six, has wanted to be in football since he was a kid growing up in Michigan. The son of a high school coach, he used to take his naps on tackling dummies. When he was seven, he kept his own scouting book, filling a notebook with players the Lions drafted and ones he wanted them to draft. While attending the University of Michigan, he got an internship in the Packers’ public-relations department. It turned out to be a good connection for him because when he moved to New York City in 1997, a sportswriting legend needed his help.

  At that time, Dick Schaap was working with former Packer Jerry Kramer on Distant Replay, the final installment in their trilogy of Packer diaries. Schaap needed research help from someone who was in tune with contemporary Green Bay players, so Nagy was his man. A proud name-dropper, Schaap regaled Nagy with tales about Malcolm X, Arthur Ashe, and Robert Kennedy. Nagy helped Schaap finish the book and enjoyed the time he spent with him, but book-writing was not his passion. The next year he began working with someone who would become a sports celebrity of sorts for football fans, although he and Nagy were both unknowns at the time.

  He was hired by former NFL scout Gary Horton, the founder of a think tank for draftniks called War Room, Inc. The small staff watched coaches’ tape, which captures all twenty-two players at once on camera; tapped into sources from around the league; and wrote draft reports. One of Nagy’s coworkers at the time was an even-younger-looking Todd McShay, who can now be seen on TV, not looking a day over twenty-five, dueling Mel Kiper during ESPN’s draft coverage. “I think we’re both doing exactly what we want to be doing,” Nagy says. He got his NFL break in 2000 with Washington and made it to New England in 2002. When Pioli left the Patriots in January 2009, Nagy wasn’t far behind him.

  As he studies and takes notes on players in Mobile, he might be the most self-assured scout in town. For one, he’s
in his backyard. He and his wife have made south Alabama their home, so if anything happens during the week that he misses, he’s got sources in the area who can fill him in. Most important, he knows what Pioli and college scouting director Phil Emery are looking for in players. He’s been trained for nine years in the Patriots/Chiefs system, so when he excitedly talks about a player he’s seen, there’s a good chance the bosses will be excited as well.

  A couple people from the week have gotten his attention.

  “Well, there’s Rodney Hudson. This guy is going to be a good pro. He’s highly, highly intelligent. He was an undersized guard at Florida State, but he’ll probably be a center in the pros. Really impressive guy. He was essentially an offensive line coach on the field.”

  The Chiefs don’t need a starting quarterback, but there’s a down-the-road project who the scout believes is going to surprise people.

  “If I could pick a quarterback who we’ll all look back in five years and say, ‘Can you believe he lasted that long?’ it would be Ricky Stanzi of Iowa,” he says. “No one is talking about him as a high draft pick. He was the most improved player I saw all year. There’s something about the guy. And I’ll tell you something else: When I was watching tape here of practice, he was there, too. Watching Senior Bowl practice tape on his own.”

  Nagy has watched practices and tapes to back up his opinions. He admits that he used to watch too much tape because of his youth and insecurity. He’d never played the game in college, and yet he’d look around a New England draft room and see former collegians and pros like Pioli, Dimitroff, and Vital, and he’d be intimidated by the credentials that they had and he didn’t. He eventually learned to maintain the intensity he brought to the job without trying to hammer people with the fact that he belonged. Pioli pulled him aside in New England and told him that he could see that he knew his stuff and respected the effort he put into his work.