War Room

by Michael Holley

  After working with Blank for three years, Dimitroff understands him. The two are so friendly that when they tried, without an agent, to renegotiate Dimitroff’s contract a couple months earlier, they abruptly stopped. They had gone for Italian food one night, and when they talked about the parameters of a deal at dinner, it didn’t feel right. They decided that they wanted a new contract to be done, but they didn’t want to bring negotiating into their relationship. That led to the potentially odd situation of Dimitroff’s agent trying to make a deal with Rich McKay, the Falcons’ president, whom Dimitroff succeeded as general manager. It quickly became a nonissue, as Dimitroff’s original contract, which was well below the $1.2 million average annual salary for GMs, swelled to one of the best deals among league executives.

  Blank didn’t know Dimitroff before he hired him; he’s gotten to know him better since working with him, but perhaps this proposed deal the GM wants to do is most revealing about who he is. The fact is, no one in the organization or community is pressuring him to do a deal. They’re comfortable with him. He’s brought a steadiness to Atlanta that the Falcons have never seen, with their thirty-three wins in his three seasons representing the best forty-eight-game stretch in franchise history. In town, corporations are willing to pay top dollar for him to speak. He and Angeline belong to a church, Peachtree Presbyterian, where the pastor sometimes mentions him by name during sermons. He has great relationships with local and national media members, who praise him for his accessibility and thoughtfulness.

  It’s comfortable. But that’s not his goal. If he wanted to be a general manager who collects checks and carefully protects the job he has, he’d never even dream of dealing for Jones or Green. What’s the point? Why make yourself a target when no one else is making you a target? Because of all his other interests, which take him from bike paths to snow-covered mountains, people sometimes overlook a humble confidence that comes from being born into a football family. His father was never about retreating. He attacked. Sometimes the elder Tom Dimitroff did that too much, like the time in Canada when he felt a player was being too mouthy and too disrespectful, so he just popped him. Right in the kisser. His youngest child subscribed to a newer school and had a different temperament, but he wasn’t afraid to fully dive into something seen as unconventional and, in the eyes of some, foolish.

  Dimitroff is not insulted by Blank’s insistence that he listen to more voices before trading into the top ten, but he is nervous that too many people with knowledge of the plan will cause a media leak. It doesn’t happen. Soon, all sides of football operations are tuned in to what could be happening on draft day. The people in the know include Vital, Snead, and college scouting director Dave Caldwell; pro scouts Ran Carthon and DeJuan Polk, whose early research shows that the Falcons will be left with a player such as Wisconsin tackle Gabe Carimi if they stay at 27; and members of Mike Smith’s coaching staff, including offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey and receivers coach Terry Robiskie.

  Even as the Falcons continue to think in terms of acquiring either player, stories of Jones’s competitiveness are popping up in, of all places, Kansas City. The Chiefs had the receiver in for a visit, and he and head coach Todd Haley began going in depth on a couple subjects. Haley has coached two Hall of Fame—caliber receivers in Terrell Owens and Larry Fitzgerald, and one just a notch below that level in Keyshawn Johnson. Haley quickly fell for Jones, and what may have sealed it was a challenge.

  “We started talking about Ping-Pong and how I love to play,” Haley says. “I have a table at my house. When he found that out, he wanted to skip lunch and drive to the house instead so we could see who was the best. He just had that confidence about him. I remember Keyshawn was like that: Tell him that the game was in the parking lot and he’d be there.”

  A couple months earlier in Indianapolis, Jones blew away league evaluators when he decided to run, even though doctors had discovered a small fracture in his foot. He had planned to sit out, but the competitive atmosphere got the best of him and he turned in a torrid workout, which included a sub-4.4-second performance in the forty-yard dash.

  The more the Falcons study him and hear about him, the more they like him. Their scouting department has given him the same grade, 8.0, that they had on Matt Ryan in the spring of 2008. The only thing left for the organization to do is go see him, one-on-one, in Alabama.

  There are times to take an SUV for a quick trip to a neighboring state, and this is not one of them. Dimitroff, Smith, Mularkey, Robiskie, Snead, Vital, and Caldwell are able to make themselves comfortable, easily, on the owner’s G4 jet for the short trip to Tuscaloosa. The plane says a lot about Blank. While it has top-of-the-line finishes and was smartly designed by Blank’s wife, Stephanie, who has a passion for interior design, there is no Falcons logo to be found on the aircraft. When Dimitroff once asked Blank the reason for that, he replied that it was important to be stylish but not ostentatious. He just didn’t believe that a Falcons logo on the plane was in good taste.

  The lack of an emblem certainly doesn’t affect the ride for the Falcons’ party. They were in Atlanta one moment and standing in the lobby of the Hotel Capstone the next. When they see Jones, it’s hard to remember that they are visiting with a receiver. He’s built as if he moonlights as a bronze sculpture. He’s six feet two inches and every bit of 220 pounds, his muscles perpetually flexed, seemingly just as capable of punishing as being punished. On this day, briefly, he’s also annoyed.

  He has met with many teams already, and all of them have a more realistic shot of drafting him than the Falcons. He has a look on his face that seems to ask the obvious question: How in hell do you expect to move from the late twenties to the single digits? With your draft picks and someone else’s?

  The meeting with Jones quickly turns pleasant. Atlanta’s former college director, Phil Emery, described Jones as a “joy to be around” and someone who had “moxie” and Jones displays those qualities for the Falcons. At one point Mularkey asks him about a negative play he saw on film. Jones acknowledges the play and then promises the offensive coordinator, “Listen, I will kill that guy.”

  He handles himself well when ribbed and tested by Robiskie, who has seen it all in thirty years of coaching and has a son, Brian, playing receiver in the NFL. The younger Robiskie is a member of the Browns, one of the teams Jones has heard is in the market for him. But as the coaches have their conversations with Jones, Dimitroff’s mind has wandered and he’s decided that there’s no way Jones will be playing in Cleveland or anywhere else but Atlanta. He thinks about the times during the regular season when defenses would get creative and tilt their coverages to Roddy White. He imagines the challenges of a team having to deal with White and Jones and Tony Gonzalez.

  “This is no disrespect to Mike Jenkins, because he’s a damn good receiver,” Dimitroff says later. “But I’ve always been intrigued with the prospect of having a one and one-A with Roddy and someone like Julio.”

  It’s what he thought about in October when he stood in his office and stared at what were just numbers and names on a board. He thought about it many times during the season, and even after with the scouting trips to Mobile and Indianapolis. But just as Blank believes that you get what you pay for, and therefore gets the finest material for his suits and high-quality finishes around his home, the same is true to a degree in the NFL. There’s a heavy price to move up, yet there’s no guarantee that the player will be as great as you project.

  When Dimitroff talks to Heckert again, he’s got an idea of what the move will cost: He’ll obviously have to exchange 27 for 6, but he’ll have to include next year’s first-round pick, a second and fourth in 2011, and a fourth in 2012. He weighs the player vs. the pain of the compensation. He can live without the fours. The exchange of 27 for 6 is the obvious cost of doing business. But the 1 and 2 will sting. He says will sting because he’s going to do it.

  Leading up to the draft, he goes back and forth with Heckert: Will you do the deal even if a p
layer unexpectedly slips to you at 6? Will you do the deal if a player unexpectedly comes off the board? Each time the answer is yes. The Atlanta Falcons and Dimitroff are going to make a bold play for the top of the draft, a move that won’t be endorsed by one of the voices in the business that Dimitroff respects the most.

  15

  War Room

  On Thursday afternoon, several hours before the start of the NFL draft, the phone lights up in Bill Belichick’s Foxboro office. It would be tough to argue that the incessant ringing bothers him. Since becoming the coach of the Patriots in 2000, Belichick has made a draft-day deal with all but eight teams in the league. The Jets are among the eight who have never called, and if they ever do, Belichick will likely think Sol Rosenberg and Frank Rizzo, two of the telephone prankster characters from the Jerky Boys, have something to do with it.

  The current call is from Atlanta, and it’s not the usual trade inquiry. Thomas Dimitroff is on the line, and he wants to exchange ideas about many things, including the dramatic trade he has on the table with Cleveland.

  In the past six weeks or so, Dimitroff’s most singular thought has been moving to the top of the draft and taking Alabama receiver Julio Jones. He’s visualized Jones as a Falcon so often that when he visualized on Wednesday night, he briefly panicked. He wondered if the organization had sent any Falcons gear to New York for Jones to wear when his name is announced at Radio City Music Hall. He was relieved to learn that all of those details are handled by the league. For the next three days and seven rounds, all he has to worry about is picking football players.

  After some general draft conversation, Dimitroff and Belichick get into the specifics of the Falcons-Browns trade.

  “Thomas, I’m just telling you as a friend,” Belichick says, “I wouldn’t do it.”

  Belichick has a couple good reasons for his analysis and he’s willing to share. He often says that the primary job of a receiver is to simply get open and catch the ball, and he doesn’t like what he sees from Jones in either department. He thinks the receiver struggles to get open on intermediate routes, doesn’t play as fast as his superb timed speed suggests, and too often displays inconsistent hands. There’s also the issue of value. When Belichick began studying the 2011 draft, he saw great depth at the receiver position. Why go all-out for someone like Jones when you can likely have a Jonathan Baldwin, who, as far as Belichick can see, is just as good if not better than Jones? If Belichick wanted even more insight on Jones, he could always ask the receiver’s head coach, Nick Saban, the two-time national championship winner who was Belichick’s first defensive coordinator in Cleveland. But Belichick has seen enough on his own without going to Saban for an additional report.

  Dimitroff is not shocked by the comments. Not only does he respect Belichick’s opinion, but some of his own opinions exist because of what Belichick has taught him over the years. When he first got to the Patriots in 2002, he took a more scientific approach to studying hands and separation after hearing Belichick describe what a good receiver should be able to do. But, in this case, what it comes down to is a basic, subjective disagreement.

  From his film study and interviews, Dimitroff concluded that a lot of Jones’s drops came from his competitiveness and his belief that he could make a play each time he touched the ball. Sometimes he simply got ahead of himself. There’s also the chance that Lionel Vital’s pithy breakdown of Jones is so accurate that the Falcons will have to learn to live with some surprising incompletions. After all, Vital said that Jones is Terrell Owens, and for all his greatness, Owens has often been criticized for his drops.

  As for the criticism that is surely coming his way in a few hours, Dimitroff also learned from Belichick how to approach it. He watched and listened when Belichick chose to go with Tom Brady over Drew Bledsoe in 2001; released Lawyer Milloy less than a week before the start of the 2003 season; “reached” for a future All-Pro guard named Logan Mankins in the first round in 2005; and even allowed one of the icons of the 2001 championship season, Adam Vinatieri, to make it to free agency and eventually become a Colt in 2006. Belichick’s standard line for all occasions is the same: “I did what I thought was best for the team.”

  Dimitroff believes that he’s doing the same thing. Based on where the Falcons are at this stage of their development, accumulating picks is not what they need. What they need, their general manager thinks, is to cobble some picks together, move up from 27 to 6, and get an impact player. He’s thought about that for more than a month. He’s cross-checked it with the Falcons, starting with Arthur Blank and working his way down the organizational chart. He’s mentioned it to two friends, Belichick and Scott Pioli, and his record with them is 1–1. Pioli, who was told of the plan before Dimitroff’s conversation with Belichick, said he would do it; Belichick said no way.

  Even if Pioli and Belichick told him different things, at least Dimitroff knows that those two understand what kind of step he’s taking and the ramifications of it. If he’s wrong, no one will write about the democratic nature of the process and how the entire Atlanta organization was on board with the move. If this goes bad, he’s the star of the movie, and depending on just how bad it is, it could cost him his job or at least his reputation as a sound GM. If he succeeds, even the ticket-takers and their cousins will claim a role in helping the deal go forward. It’s the way it is, and he’s content with it.

  Dimitroff, Belichick, and Pioli will enter the draft with different team needs and different ideas on how to fill them. All three of them have been thinking about the best way to go forward for weeks. They all had winning seasons in 2010, but it didn’t feel that way. Since being turned away from the play-offs on consecutive January weekends, one coach and two GMs have spent long hours scouting and planning. They’ve been thinking of what they’re going to do in their respective draft rooms, how their decisions in rooms with neutral-colored walls can get them back to playing the last game of the season on a neutral field on Super Bowl Sunday. Soon, finally, it will be time for all of them to turn their thoughts to action.

  As the first round begins, no one in New England, Kansas City, or Atlanta is surprised by the first five picks. At number six, the huge Atlanta draft room, twice the size of New England’s and Kansas City’s and filled with twice as many people, erupts into high-fives and smiles when the much-discussed deal is announced. There are two TVs in the room, one tuned to ESPN and the other to the NFL Network, and the volume happens to be up on the ESPN TV when analyst and former NFL coach Jon Gruden gives his thoughts on the trade. The very first thing he mentions is … the inconsistent hands of Julio Jones. ESPN has taken sports visual media to another level with its unlimited resources, so there is a well-produced montage for millions and millions to see that Jones, apparently, can’t catch. There are dismissive waves at the TV from the Falcons’ draft room and instead a focus on what has been accomplished. The bank of phones at the head table, where Dimitroff, Blank, and head coach Mike Smith sit, begins to ring.

  It’s Kansas City.

  “Hey, man,” Pioli says to Dimitroff. “I’m sitting here with Clark and we both say that took some big ones. Congrats.” Clark Hunt, the Chiefs’ chairman of the board, has a line for Blank that Pioli relays. “Hey, Thomas. Clark wants to know if you’ve told Arthur how much this move is going to cost him.”

  They all laugh as the draft continues. It is now making up for the surprises it lacked in the top five. One of the top three players on the Chiefs’ board, Missouri defensive end Aldon Smith, goes seventh to the 49ers. Smith is instinctive and powerful, and in his first full year of college ball he produced an impressive eleven and a half sacks. The Chiefs didn’t expect him to go in the top ten, but with so many teams talking about getting to the quarterback in a quarterbacks’ league, the selection isn’t outrageous.

  Quarterbacks and pass rushers, in fact, have now accounted for ten of the first fourteen selections in the draft. At number fifteen, with Miami on the clock, the Chiefs have a stake in the player wh
o will go here, too. Pioli is willing to trade up six spots from number 21 so the Chiefs can draft Florida’s Mike Pouncey. They see him as a day one starter in the league, a center with smarts, toughness, and the type of talent that can transform an entire line. They spent a lot of time talking about the position in their draft meetings, and they were going to take at least one center, maybe even two, in this draft. But as much as they love Pouncey and as pressing as their need at center is, they can’t agree to what they believe to be a fair deal with the Dolphins and their general manager, Jeff Ireland. So the Dolphins take the in-state kid, and the Chiefs and Patriots excitedly look at the remaining players on the board. The run on quarterbacks, four in the top twelve, has led to the availability of some excellent players.

  Belichick sees an opportunity to grab one of the two first-round tackles that he has been extremely high on during the draft process. Dallas took one of them, Southern Cal’s Tyron Smith, at number 9. “I think you’ll have a hard time pointing to three or four players in this draft who are better than he is,” Belichick says of Smith.